The days of privation were over, and Newton had earned this rest and prosperity. Great people often came to dine with him. At one of his dinners, Newton proposed to drink, not to the health of kings and princes, but to all honest persons, to whatever country they belonged. "We are all friends," he added, "because we unanimously aim at the only object worthy of man, which is the knowledge of truth. We are also of the same religion, because, leading a simple life, we conform ourselves to what is right, and we endeavor sincerely to give to the Supreme Being that worship which, according to our feeble lights, we are persuaded will please him most." Other honors now come to Newton. In 1703, he was elected President of the Royal Society, and was annually reëlected during the remaining twenty-five years of his life. On April 16, 1705, when he was sixty-three, Queen Anne conferred the honor of knighthood upon her most illustrious subject, Sir Isaac Newton, before a distinguished company at Cambridge University. In 1704, the year previous, his great work on optics had been published, written over twenty years before. About this time, it seems that the great philosopher would have liked to marry Lady Norris, the widow of Sir William Norris, Baronet of Speke, and Member of Parliament. Sent to Delhi as ambassador to the Great Mogul, he died in 1702, between Mauritius and St. Helena, on his homeward passage. He was the third husband to Lady Norris, and Sir Isaac, now over sixty, desired to be the fourth, as appears from the following letter:-- "Madam,--Your ladyship's great grief at the loss of Sir William shows that if he had returned safe home, your ladyship could have been glad to have lived still with a husband, and therefore your aversion at present from marrying again can proceed from nothing else than the memory of him whom you have lost. To be always thinking on the dead, is to live a melancholy life among sepulchres, and how much grief is an enemy to your health, is very manifest by the sickness it brought when you received the first news of your widowhood. And can your ladyship resolve to spend the rest of your days in grief and sickness? "Can you resolve to wear a widow's habit perpetually,--a habit which is less acceptable to company, a habit which will be always putting you in mind of your lost husband, and thereby promote you grief and indisposition till you leave it off? The proper remedy for all these mischiefs is a new husband, and whether your ladyship should admit of a proper remedy for such maladies, is a question which I hope will not need much time to consider of.