“Madam,” so runs the letter: “in your ladyship’s (imparted to me by my sister Ranelagh) I find myself so confounded with civilities, that if she that blessed me with the sight of your letter had not (for her own discharge) exacted of me this acknowledgment of my having seen it, I must confess I should scarce have ventured to return a verbal answer, deterred by the impossibility of writing without wronging a resentment[160] which I can express as little as I deserved the praises and the favours that have produced it.” And so on. The Countess had suggested the publication of his pamphlet. But she did more: she had invited the young Squire to pay a visit to Moore Park, and to bring his manuscript in his pocket— “As for my pamphlet, Madam, had it expected the glory of entertaining you, it should certainly have appeared in a less careless dress ... yet my just sense of the smallness of the accession the Press can be to the honour of your ladyship’s perusal makes me decline its publication. And as that paper cannot have either a higher applause or nobler end than the being liked and practised at Moore Park, so if it have either anyway diverted your ladyship, or had the least influence upon my lord, I have reached my desires and gone beyond my hopes. However, Madam, I am richly rewarded for writing such a book by being enjoyned to fetch it where you are. So welcome a command is very unlikely to be disobeyed; but my obedience, Madam, must be paid to the order, not the motive. The fetching of my book may be one effect of my remove, but not the errand of it; for sure, Madam, your modesty cannot be so injurious, both to yourself and me, as to persuade you that any inferior (that is, other) motive can be looked upon by me as an invitation to a journey which will bless me with so great a happiness as that of your ladyship’s conversation, and give me the opportunity of assuring you, better than my present haste and my disorder will now permit me, in how transcendent a degree I am, Madam, your Ladyship’s humble and obliged servant, Robert Boyle.” It was a particularly cold, wet July[161]; the confusions of the country seemed to have infected the very air; and those people who were “wont to make fires, not against winter but against cold,” had “generally displac’d the florid and the verdant Ornaments in their chimneys,” where “Vulcan” was more proper than “Flora.”[162] But it must be taken for granted that the sun shone out one day, not long after the folding and dispatching of this letter to the Countess; and that Robert Boyle and his horse did find their way by the old coach-road from London into Hertfordshire. And when they came to the little town of Rickmansworth, lying sleepily in the valley, clustered about the huge Church in its midst, horse and rider must have turned upwards to the left, under spreading oak-trees. The “common way” still runs upwards through the Park.