And the loud echo which returns the notes.
...
The ladies angling in the crystal lake
Feast on the waters with the prey they take;
At once victorious with their lines and eyes
They make the fishes and the men their prize.”
Mr. Waller saw everything couleur de rose. “I know his calling as a Poet,” wrote Lady Ranelagh once to Robert Boyle, when Waller had been paying her one of his elaborate compliments, “gives him license to say as great things as he can without intending that they should signify anything more than that he said them.”[324] And it is possible some of the older inhabitants of Pall Mall did not look so kindly on the “improvements” in St. James’s Park.
The old Mall, and the old game that was played there, dated back to James I. There was a “Pell Mell Close” planted with apple-trees that gave the name to Apple-Tree Yard, St. James’s Square. The houses had been built on both sides of the Old Mall;—“The Pall Mall,” as it was called, or “Pall Mall Walk,” or “The Pavement.” Its double row of seventy elm trees—140 trees in all—running its length, from the Haymarket to St. James’s, may well have been the “living gallery of aged trees,” in Waller’s poem of 1661. Lady Ranelagh’s house was one of those on the south side, at the west end, of the Mall; houses advertised as “on the Park side, with Gardens or Mounts adjoining to the Royal Gardens.” There were various interesting inhabitants of the Mall about the time that Boyle went to live there with Lady Ranelagh. Dr. Sydenham, the fashionable London physician, had been living there since 1658—an old friend of theirs: one of the great Dorsetshire Puritan family of Sydenhams, of whom the doctor’s brother, the Parliamentarian Colonel Sydenham, was the chief. Mrs. Knight the singer, and Dr. Isaac Barrow the divine, and the notorious Countess of Southesk who figures in the Memoirs of Grammont, were all living in the Mall. There were taverns, too, and shops, with signboards: “The King’s Head,” and “The Two Golden Balls.” And Pall Mall was Clubland, even then: “Wood’s at the Pell Mell, our old house for clubbing,” wrote Pepys in 1660. But in 1670, after Boyle went to live there, it was still a rural, leafy little suburb of fashionable London, between Whitehall and St. James’s Palace, nestled among the old trees, under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace; the Painted Chamber, and the Star Chamber, and St. Stephen’s Chapel—“That house where all our ills were shaped,” as Waller called it,—after the Restoration. So rural was the Old Mall, that Dr. Sydenham used to sit smoking his pipe at his open window looking on to the Pavement, with a silver tankard of ale on the window-sill; and when once a thief ran off with the doctor’s tankard, thief and tankard alike were lost “in the bushes of Bond Street.”[325]
In 1669, Nell Gwynne was living on the north side, and at the east end, of the Mall, next door to Lady Mary Howard; but in 1671, she crossed over to a house on the Park side of Pall Mall, the leasehold of which had been given her by Charles II; and there, from this time till her death in 1687, “Maddam Elinor Gwyn” was living, only two doors off from Lady Ranelagh and Robert Boyle. Those strips of back gardens, with “raised mounts” in them looking over to the Royal Gardens, were very near together. Did Boyle, whose laboratory was at the back of Lady Ranelagh’s house, see Mrs. Nellie on her mount, talking to the King who stood looking up at her from the green walk below? Evelyn was in attendance that day. “I both saw and heard,” wrote Evelyn afterwards in his diary, “a very familiar discourse between [the King] and Mrs. Nellie, as they cal’d an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and [the King] standing on yᵉ greene walke under it....”[326]
But that was in May 1671; and by that time Robert Boyle had been very ill for eleven months, and was only beginning to recover. The year 1669, and part of 1670, had been very busy. Besides his contributions to the Royal Society’s Transactions, he had published further work on the Spring and Weight of the Air, and a second edition of his Physiological Essays. Du Moulin’s translation of the Devil of Mascon, with Boyle’s introduction, had appeared; and Boyle was using all his influence, personal and literary, to heal the feud between the Royal Society and the Universities, in which Sprat and Glanville, Stubbe, Crosse, and others, were taking sides. And in 1670 there appeared Boyle’s Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things, better known by the delightful title of “Cosmical Suspicions.” Boyle was at this time at the height of his scientific and literary popularity: “Mr. Boiles Styll” meant very much to the intellectual London of that day. It had its disciples, and it had its critics. Evelyn has spoken of “those incumbrances” in it “which now and then render the way a little tedious”; and there were people who thought that in his literary style Mr. Boyle was not quite so happy as in his experiments.[327]