And it is very certain Lord Brouncker and his company laughed loudest over the second verse—
“For though the Muses should prove kind
And fill our empty brain,
Yet if rough Neptune rouse the wind
To wave the azure main,
Our paper, pen, and ink, and we
Roll up and down our ships at sea,
With a fa la la la la!”
Robert Boyle was in town during that winter of 1664-5. There were several fixtures in December, January and February, which may have drawn him there. In December he had been elected into the Company of the Royal Mines, “and into that of Battery.” On December 22, Petty’s double-bottomed boat, the Experiment, was at last launched, in the presence of the King.[290] On January 9, the Royal Society carried their new Charter Book and Laws to the King at Whitehall, for the King to write “Founder” after his name, and the Duke of York to enter himself as a Fellow. Gresham College was particularly active in February and March, and Hooke was lecturing there on the Comet which had lately been the talk of London. “Mighty talk there is of the Comet that is seen a’ nights; and the King and Queen did sit up last night to see it, and did, it seems.”[291] Lord Sandwich, who was with the fleet at Portsmouth, thought it was “the most extraordinary thing he ever saw.” And Robert Hooke, the little deformed chorister of Christchurch, was trying to explain this phenomenon to the London of 1665: “Among other things, proving very probably that this is the very same Comet that appeared before, in the year 1618, and that in such a time probably will appear again, which is a very new opinion; but all will be in print.”[292] And on February 15, the day on which Mr. Pepys was admitted a member of the Royal Society, the discussion and experiments had been on Fire: “how it goes out in a place where the ayre is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is exhausted, which they shewed by an engine on purpose.”[293]
It was after this meeting that some of the philosophers adjourned to the Crown Tavern, behind the Exchange, for a “club supper”; but though Pepys expressly mentions having seen Mr. Boyle at the afternoon meeting of the Society, he does not make it clear whether Mr. Boyle was at the club supper afterwards. He may have been: “Here excellent discourse, till ten at night,” records Pepys—“and then home.”