English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to AnneMitchell, Donald Grant
History
English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to Anne
Mitchell, Donald Grant
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life
Science was making a push for itself in these times. Newton had discovered
the law of gravitation before Charles II. died; the King himself was no
bad dabbler in chemistry.
Robert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help
him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Royal Society I
spoke of; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and
the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes--devoting his fortune to worthy works;
estimable in private life; dignified and serene; tall in person and
spare--wearing, like every other well-born Londoner, the curled,
long-bottomed wig of France, and making sentences in exposition of his
thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample.
He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully
constructed; and this is the way he says it:
“To be told that an eye is the organ of sight, and that this is
performed by that faculty of the mind which, from its function, is
called visive, will give a man but a sorry account of the
instruments and manner of vision itself, or of the knowledge of that
Opificer who, as the Scripture speaks, formed the eye; and he that
can take up with this easy theory of Vision, will not think it
necessary to take the pains to dissect the eyes of animals, nor
study the books of mathematicians to understand Vision; and
accordingly will have but mean thoughts of the contrivance of the
Organ, and the skill of the Artificer, in comparison of the ideas
that will be suggested of both of them to him, that being profoundly
skilled in anatomy and optics, by their help takes asunder the
several coats, humors, muscles, of which that exquisite dioptrical
instrument consists; and having separately considered the size,
figure, consistence, texture, diaphaneity or opacity, situation, and
connection of each of them, and their coaptation in the whole eye,
shall discover, by the help of the laws of optics, how admirably
this little organ is fitted to receive the incident beams of light
and dispose them in the best manner possible for completing the
lively representation of the almost infinitely various objects of
sight.”
What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Royal
Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal),
is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man
who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Samuel
Pepys wrote his _Diary_?
_John Bunyan._
I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the
Restoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for
this morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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