Purchas, who in the reign of our first James, had spent his life in compiling his _Relation of the World_, when he gave it to the public, for the reward of his labours was thrown into prison, at the suit of his printer. Yet this was the book which, he informs Charles I. in his dedication, his father read every night with great profit and satisfaction. The Marquis of Worcester, in a petition to parliament, in the reign of Charles II., offered to publish the hundred processes and machines, enumerated in his very curious "Centenary of Inventions," on condition that money should be granted to extricate him from the _difficulties in which he had involved himself by the prosecution of useful discoveries_. The petition does not appear to have been attended to! Many of these admirable inventions were lost. The _steam-engine_ and the _telegraph_, may be traced among them. It appears by the Harleian MS. 7524, that Rushworth, the author of the "Historical Collections," passed the last years of his life in gaol, where indeed he died. After the Restoration, when he presented to the king several of the privy council's books, which he had preserved from ruin, he received for his only reward the _thanks of his majesty_. Rymer, the collector of the Foedera, must have been sadly reduced, by the following letter, I found addressed by Peter le Neve, Norroy, to the Earl of Oxford. "I am desired by Mr. Rymer, historiographer, to lay before your lordship the circumstances of his affairs. He was forced some years back to part with all his choice printed books to subsist himself: and now, he says, he must be forced, for subsistence, to sell all his MS. collections to the best bidder, without your lordship will be pleased to buy them for the queen's library. They are fifty volumes in folio, of public affairs, which he hath collected, but not printed. The price he asks is five hundred pounds." Simon Ockley, a learned student in Oriental literature, addresses a letter to the same earl, in which he paints his distresses in glowing colours. After having devoted his life to Asiatic researches, then very uncommon, he had the mortification of dating his preface to his great work from Cambridge Castle, where he was confined for debt; and, with an air of triumph, feels a martyr's enthusiasm in the cause for which he perishes.