ture and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, 'Let Newton be,' and all was light."

No other discovery ever made in science approaches in importance to the
discovery of the principle of universal gravitation--the principle that
every particle of matter is attracted by every other particle with a
force proportioned inversely to the square of their distances. Vague
ideas of some such principle had long been floating in the minds of some
men; had probably been thus floating since ever men began to think
seriously over the phenomena of inanimate nature. But the discovery of
the principle was, however, as distinctly the achievement of Newton as
"Paradise Lost" is the work of Milton. We find it hard now to form to
ourselves any clear idea of a world to which Newton's principle was
unknown. It would be almost as easy to realize the idea of a world
without {273} light or atmosphere. Newton is called by Sir David
Brewster the greatest philosopher of any age. Sir John Herschel assigns
to the name of Newton "a place in our veneration which belongs to no
other in the annals of science." In this book we have only to record the
date at which the pure and simple life of this great man came to its end.
The important events of his career belong to an earlier period; his
teachings and his fame are for all time. The humblest of historians as
well as the greatest may ask himself what is the principle of history
which bids us to assign so much more space to the wars of kings and the
controversies of statesmen than to the life and the deeds of a man like
Newton. In the whole history of the world during Newton's lifetime, the
one most important fact, the one fact of which the magnitude dwarfs all
other facts, is the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Yet its
meaning may be explained in fewer words than would be needed to describe
the nature of the antagonism between Walpole and Pulteney, or the reason
why Queen Anne was succeeded by King George.

We have, however, in these pages only to deal with history in its old
and, we suppose, its everlasting fashion--that of telling what happened
in the way of actual fact, telling the story of the time. The English
public took the death of George the First with becoming composure; the
vast majority of the people never troubled their heads about it. It gave
a flutter of hope to Spain; it set the councils of the Stuart party in
eager commotion for a while; but it made no change