The brilliant epoch of Elizabeth spent, intellectual life smouldered during the reigns of the first two Stuarts and the Protectorate, to be renewed and rekindled not by fresh literary activity but by the inquisitive temper which invaded the nation as it emerged, with the Restoration, from civil conflict and the slough of doctrinal wrangling. This inquisitiveness took shape in the institution of the Royal Society. The _foyer_ of the Royal Society was London, although some of its most distinguished members migrated later with Wilkins to Oxford. Of the eminent men who formed the first Royal Society Wallis, Wilkins, Foster, Jonathan Goddard, Sir William Ball, Lawrence Rooke, Sir William Petty, Ward the mathematician, Ray, Woodward the mineralogist, Flamsteed, Sloane, Boyle, Halley, Chief-Justice Hale, Lord Keeper Guilford, with Sprat the Bishop of Rochester (its historian), Cowley and Dryden (its poets), and Sir Robert Moray--Wallis, Foster, Rooke, Ray, Woodward, Flamsteed, Guilford, Cowley, and Dryden, were Cantabrigians. Four of the most prominent, Ward, Boyle, Sloane and Ball, were at no university; Goddard went from Oxford to Cambridge where he graduated; Petty though he became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford was educated at foreign universities; Moray was at S. Andrews and Paris; Wilkins, Halley, Hale, and Sprat were at Oxford. Among the first fellows there came from Oxford Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Hook of the microscope, Sydenham: More the Platonist, Sir William Temple, Willughby the ornithologist, and Grew, came from Cambridge. Two more of Charles’s courtiers joined Moray, Kenelm Digby from Oxford, and Villiers Duke of Buckingham from Cambridge. [Sidenote: The Cambridge Platonists.]