and having enlarged their
number, were denominated the Royal Society. But this patent was all
they obtained from the king. Though Charles was a lover of the sciences,
particularly chemistry and mechanics, he animated them by his example
alone not by his bounty. His craving courtiers and mistresses, by whom
he was perpetually surrounded, engrossed all his expense, and left him
neither money nor attention for literary merit. His contemporary Lewis,
who fell short of the king's genius and knowledge in this particular,
much exceeded him in liberality. Besides pensions conferred on learned
men throughout all Europe, his academies were directed by rules and
supported by salaries; a generosity which does great honor to his
memory; and, in the eyes of all the ingenious part of mankind, will be
esteemed an atonement for many of the errors of his reign. We may be
surprised that this example should not be more followed by princes;
since it is certain that that bounty, so extensive, so beneficial, and
so much celebrated, cost not this monarch so great a sum as is often
conferred on one useless, overgrown favorite or courtier.

But though the French Academy of Sciences was directed, encouraged, and
supported by the sovereign, there arose in England some men of superior
genius, who were more than sufficient to cast the balance, and who drew
on themselves and on their native country the regard and attention of
Europe. Besides Wilkins, Wren, Wallis, eminent mathematicians, Hooke,
an accurate observer by microscopes, and Sydenham, the restorer of true
physic, there flourished during this period a Boyle and a Newton; men
who trod with cautious, and therefore the more secure steps, the only
road which leads to true philosophy.

Boyle improved the pneumatic engine, invented by Otto Guericke, and was
thereby enabled to make several new and curious experiments on the air,
as well as on other bodies: his chemistry is much admired by those who
are acquainted with that art: his hydrostatics contain a greater mixture
of reasoning and invention with experiment than any other of his works;
but his reasoning is still remote from that boldness and temerity which
had led astray so many philosophers. Boyle was a great partisan of the
mechanical philosophy; a theory which by discovering some of the secrets
of nature, and allowing us to imagine the rest, is so agreeable to the
natural vanity and curiosity of men. He died in 1691, aged sixty-five.

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