England could not rest satisfied without interfering in the disputes of other states, and had lent a helping hand to the Archduke Charles of Austria, who was playing a sort of game at bob-cherry with the Spanish crown, which hung suspended over his head in a very tempting manner. A fleet was sent under Admiral Sir George Booke to convey the archduke to Lisbon; and Booke, who was as cunning as an old crow, proceeded towards Barcelona, which would have been nuts for him had he succeeded in taking it. In this attempt, however, he failed; but putting his vessel astern, and altering her gib towards Gibraltar, he made an attack on the fortress, which he took with the utmost facility. For this service the conqueror was rewarded with an empty vote of thanks, and he had no sooner got the copy of the resolution than he put it in his pipe and smoked it—according to some; or, as others say, he merely lighted his pipe with the valueless document.
Domestic affairs did not progress very pleasantly, and the English began to quarrel with the Scotch, who evinced their national propensity to come to the scratch in a very annoying manner. The Parliaments of the two countries came into decided collision and the English legislature having prohibited the importation of Scotch heifers, "there arose," says Swindle, "a heffervescence of the most deplorable character." The queen proposed that there should be an immediate union of the two Parliaments; but the little matter could not be arranged; and as the two negatives could hot be induced to make an affirmative, Anne put an end to both by a dissolution.
In the summer of 1705, Marlborough, who had been waiting on the banks of the Blue Moselle, forced the French lines, and very hard lines they proved both to the vanquished and the victors.
We must here be permitted to introduce the beautiful episode of Sir Isaac Newton, and turn from the turmoils of war to the peaceful pursuits of science. We are sure we shall not be accused of irrelevancy if we step aside from the rushing stream of history which, like a cataract, is hurrying us rapidly along, and enjoy a few moments of calm reflection on the life and merits of the great philosopher.
Isaac Newton was born in 1642, and came as unusually little into the world as he went greatly, and indeed gigantically, out of it. His mother declared he might have been put into a quart pot at his birth, and therefore, had he been always judged by the rule of "measures not men," he would never have attained the elevation he has arrived at. In early boyhood he displayed a great mechanical turn, and buying a box of carpenter's tools, he got perhaps the first insight into plane geometry, and deduced from a few wise saws, a variety of modern instances. He was very fond of measuring time, but not by its loss alone, for he constructed a wooden clock, and ascertained the position of the sun by driving nails into the wall—hitting, no doubt, the right one on the head very readily. Having a shrewd suspicion that there was something in the wind, he would occupy himself in leaping with it and against it, to ascertain its power. These pranks did not elevate him much in his class, of which he was generally at the bottom; for the routine of his school education did not include trials of strength with old Boreas, and the other exciting pursuits in which Master Isaac Newton indulged himself. In course of time he was removed to Cambridge, where the works of Des-Cartes fell into his hands, and where those ponderous volumes, from their soporific effect upon youth, often fall out of the hands they have fallen into. Young Newton grasped them with energy, and he soon profited amazingly by their contents, which set his own mind at work to add to the stock of discovery already in existence. During the great plague in 1665, he was compelled to leave Cambridge for a rural retirement, though the rustication was not of the ordinary kind: and while sitting in an orchard, "his custom sometimes of an afternoon," an apple fell upon his head with considerable violence.
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Beginning to reason from this "argumentum ad hominem," he asked himself why every other object did not at once fall to the earth; and he even speculated on the possibility of the moon alighting heavily, and leaving him in a literally moon-struck condition. It was some time before he discovered the laws of gravitation by which the apple had been carried to his head; and it is not true, as is commonly believed, that he was struck all of a heap with the great truths that he has given to posterity. They were published in 1687, at the expense of the Royal Society, under the title of the "Principia;" and it is a curious fact, that the critics of the day were not altogether pleased with it. Some few pronounced it "a work that ought to be on every gentleman's sideboard," and our old friend, the evening paper, patronised it as a production that might "repay perusal;" * but some very learned, very cold, very dull, and very stupid, "gentlemen of the press" "regretted that Mr. Newton should have wasted so much time upon a work of such a description." They were angry with him for what they considered his levity in popularising serious matters, and advised him to keep his hands off the moon, which was far too lofty a subject for him to meddle with.