eat estates there;
and indeed it was in Ireland that most of the family had their chief
properties. But the second brother, Roger Boyle, Lord Broghhill,
already known to us for his services in Ireland under Cromwell, and
for his conspicuous fidelity to Cromwell ever since, was now in
Scotland, as President of Cromwell's Council there. _He_ may be
called the literary brother; for, though his chief activity hitherto
had been in war and politics, he had found time to write and publish
his long romance or novel called _Parthenissa_, and so to begin
a literary reputation which was to be increased by poems, tragedies,
comedies, &c., in no small profusion, in coming years. His age, at
our present date, was about thirty-four. Two years younger was
Francis Boyle, the third brother, afterwards Lord Shannon, and four
years younger still was the philosophical and scientific brother, Mr.
Boyle, or "the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle." When we last saw this
extraordinary young man, after his return from his travels, i.e. in
1645-48, he was in retirement at Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, absorbed
in studies and in chemical experiments, but corresponding eagerly
with Hartlib and others in London, and sometimes coming to town
himself, when he would attend those meetings of the _Invisible
College_, the germ of the future Royal Society, about the delights
of which Hartlib was never tired of writing to him. This mode of life
he had continued, with the interruption of a journey or two abroad,
till 1652. "Nor am I here altogether idle," he says in one of his
latest letters to Hartlib from Stalbridge; "for I can sometimes make
a shift to snatch from the importunity of my affairs leisure to trace
such plans, and frame such models, as, if my Irish fortune will
afford me quarries and woods to draw competent materials from to
construct after them, will fit me to build a pretty house in Athens,
where I may live to Philosophy and Mr. Hartlib." The necessity of
looking after the Irish fortune of which he here speaks had since
then taken him to Ireland and kept him there for the greater part of
two years. He found it, he says, "a barbarous country, where chemical
spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so
unprocurable, that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it;"
and he had betaken himself to "anatomical dissections" as the only
kind of scientific pastime that Irish conditions favoured. On
returning to England, in 1654, he had sett