Stubbe appears to have imagined that the Royal Society was really formed on the principle of Campanella; to withdraw the people from intermeddling with politics and religion, by engaging them merely in philosophical pursuits.—The reaction of the public mind is an object not always sufficiently indicated by historians. The vile hypocrisy and mutual persecutions of the numerous fanatics occasioned very relaxed and tolerant principles of religion at the Restoration; as, the democratic fury having spent itself, too great an indulgence was now allowed to monarchy. Stubbe was alarmed that, should Popery be established, the crown of England would become feudatory to foreign power, and embroil the nation in the restitution of all the abbey lands, of which, at the Reformation, the Church had so zealously been plundered. He was still further alarmed that the virtuosi would influence the education of our youth to these purposes; “an evil,” says he, “which has been guarded against by our ancestors in founding free-schools, by uniformity of instruction cementing men’s minds.” We now smile at these terrors; perhaps they were sometimes real. The absolute necessity of strict conformity to the prevalent religion of Europe was avowed in that unrivalled scheme of despotism, which menaced to efface every trace of popular freedom, and the independence of nations, under the dominion of Napoleon.
To this threat of writing his life, we have already noticed the noble apology he has drawn up for the versatility of his opinions. See p. [347]. At the moment of the Restoration it was unwise for any of the parties to reproach another for their opinions or their actions. In a national revolution, most men are implicated in the general reproach; and Stubbe said, on this occasion, that “he had observed worse faces in the society than his own.” Waller, and Sprat, and Cowley had equally commemorated the protectorship of Cromwell and the restoration of Charles. Our satirist insidiously congratulates himself that “he had never compared Oliver the regicide to Moses, or his son to Joshua;” nor that he had ever written any Pindaric ode, “dedicated to the happy memory of the most renowned Prince Oliver, Lord Protector:” nothing to recommend “the sacred urn” of that blessed spirit to the veneration of posterity; as if
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“His fame, like men, the elder it doth grow, Will of itself turn whiter too, Without what needless art can do.” |
These lines were, I think, taken from Sprat himself! Stubbe adds, it would be “imprudent in them to look beyond the act of indemnity and oblivion, which was more necessary to the Royal Society than to me, who joined with no party, &c.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”
He has described this intercourse of his enemies at court with the king, where, when this punishment was suggested, “a generous personage, altogether unknown to me, being present, bravely and frankly interposed, saying, that ‘whatever I was, I was a Roman; that Englishmen were not so precipitously to be condemned to so exemplary a punishment; that representing that book to be a libel against the king was too remote a consequence to be admitted of in a nation free-born, and governed by laws, and tender of ill precedents.’” It was a noble speech, in the relaxed politics of the court of Charles II. He who made it deserved to have had his name more explicitly told: he is designated as “that excellent Englishman, the great ornament of this age, nation, and House of Commons; he whose single worth balanceth much of the debaucheries, follies, and impertinences of the kingdom.”—A Reply unto the Letter written to Mr. Henry Stubbe, Oxford, 1671, p. 20.
Stubbe gives some curious information on this subject. Harvey published his Treatise at Frankfort, 1628, but Cæsalpinus’s work had appeared in 1593. Harvey adopted the notion, and more fully and perspicuously proved it. I shall give what Stubbe says. “Harvey, in his two Answers to Riolan, nowhere asserts the invention so to himself, as to deny that he had the intimation or notion from Cæsalpinus; and his silence I take for a tacit confession. His ambition of glory made him willing to be thought the author of a paradox he had so illustrated, and brought upon the stage, where it lay unregarded, and in all probability buried in oblivion; yet such was his modesty, as not to vindicate it to himself by telling a lie.”—Stubbe’s Censure, &c., p. 112.
I give this literary anecdote, as it enters into the history of most discoveries, of which the improvers, rather than the inventors, are usually the most known to the world. Bayle, who wrote much later than Stubbe, asserts the same, and has preserved the entire passage, art. Cæsalpinus. It is said Harvey is more expressly indebted to a passage in Servetus, which Wotton has given in the preface to his “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning,” edition 1725. The notion was probably then afloat, and each alike contributed to its development. Thus it was disputed with Copernicus, whether his great discovery of a fixed sun, and the earth wheeling round that star, was his own; others had certainly observed it; yet the invention was still Copernican: for that great genius alone corrected, extended, and gave perfection to a hint, till it expanded to a system.