Some strong attraction, then, in or near London, there undoubtedly was, and Robert Boyle’s family knew of it; but all their thrusts were successfully parried in what Sir Henry Wotton had called Robyn’s “pretty conceits.” In company Robert Boyle was to “prate” with “pure raillery” of “matrimony and amours.” He was to pity those who “dote on red and white.” He never could deplore the lover who “by losing his mistress recovers himself.” He was to declare that he had “never known the infelicities of love except by others’ sufferings”; to write exultantly about “this untamed heart.” He had, he said, so seldom seen a happy marriage, that he did not wonder “our Lawgivers should make marriage indesolvable to make it lasting.” Marriage was “a Lottery, in which there are many blanks to one prize.” And yet Robyn was as sensitive as he was proud. Not in company which prated of “matrimony and amours,” he had his own ideal. Love to him remained “the Noblest Passion of the Mind”; and at twenty-one he acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar unrivaled sort of Love, which constitutes the Conjugal Affections.” Lady Ranelagh, frustrated in one attempt, might go on hoping. “If you are in the west,” she wrote at a later date to this incorrigible brother, “let me beseech you to present my humble service to my two Lady Bristols, and wish you would disappoint Frank[179] by bringing a wife of your own to Stalbridge, a business I must still mind you of, though you give me cause to doubt you will as hardly pardon me those few words as the rest of the trouble given you here by your K. R.” But there was to be no other fair lady in Robyn’s letters or in Robyn’s life—no lady whose conversational powers ever again produced in him an “amorous rapture.” He returned to his “kind of Elysium,” and the lethal chamber of chemical research. And when once a rumour reached his relatives in Ireland that he was actually married, and his nephew Barrymore’s wife[180] was foremost in her congratulations, there was a touch of the philosopher-uncle in Robert Boyle’s superlatively polite reply. “Alas! The little gentleman and I,” he assured her, “are still at the old defiance.” Not till 1652, after Cromwell’s campaign was over, and the war in Ireland nearly at an end, did Robert Boyle revisit the land of his birth. And then he did not like it. “I must sadly confess,” he wrote, in very evident dejection, to his Dorsetshire friend, John Mallett, “that the perpetual hurry I live in, my frequent journeys, and the necessary trouble of endeavouring to settle my long-neglected and disjointed fortune, has left me very little time to converse with any book save the Bible, and scarce allowed me time to sew together some loose sheets that contain my thoughts about the Scriptures.”