herself to think, if not to feel, in unison with her “owne goode selfe.” And so Robert Boyle, like his brothers and sisters, was to be reared during those first months of his life by a foster-mother, and owing to the movements of his family at this time was to be left with her longer than he would perhaps otherwise have been. He was to be rocked in an Irish cradle, or rather nursed, Irish fashion, in a “pendulous satchell” instead of a cradle, with a slit for the baby’s head to look out of.[19] By slow degrees, this boy, born amid all the pomp and seventeenth-century splendour of his father’s mansions, was to be inured to “a coarse but cleanly diet,” and to what he afterwards so characteristically described as “the passions of the air.” They gave him, he says, “so vigorous a complexion” that ‘hardships’ were made easy to him by ‘custom,’ while the delights and conveniences of ease were endeared to him by their ‘rarity.’ Happy months of babyhood, lulled in a cottage mother’s arms, or suspended, between sleeping and waking, in that fascinating medium that was to become afterwards his life-study! Wise little head of Robert Boyle, looking out of that slit in the “pendulous satchell,” baby-observer of the firelight, and the sunlight and the shadows, enjoying, without theory, as he swung in it, the “spring of the air”! And meantime the baby’s family was preparing for a season in London. The House of Lismore was still being “re-edified” during the months that followed the birth of “Robyn.” The gardens and terraces were being laid out; the orchard wall was still building. Dick, the eldest son, and Arthur Loftus, the destined son-in-law, had been allowed to go to Dublin for the horse-races, with allowance for “wyne and extraordinaryes,” “horse-meat,” “small sums,” and “idle expenses.” The Earl liked to give presents: each New Year in his diary is a record of presents given and received; and while he seems to have kept the laced shirts and nightcaps made for him by his daughters, he had a habit of handing on the more costly gifts to other people. He was at this time tipping his musicians at Lismore, and commissioning his trusty emissary, Sir John Leeke, to buy smock-petticoats for Lady Cork and her mother Lady Fenton, who, since Sir Geoffrey’s death, had made her home for the most part with her daughter and her great son-in-law. And the Earl had given his married daughters a breeding mare apiece—each mare “with a colt at her feet,” while braces of bucks and saddle-hackneys had been dispersed among various friends. His daughter Sarah’s (Lady Digby’s) first child—a great event in the family—was born at Lismore in October; and towards the end of 1627, with the London visit in view, the Earl dispatched a footman with letters into England. Early in the spring of 1628, Sarah, with her lord and baby, left Lismore; in April, Mary Boyle was fetched away to be brought up under Lady Clayton’s charge at Cork; Lady Fenton also left Lismore; and