It was to visit this Milton—the Latin Secretary, blind among his books—that Lady Ranelagh used so frequently to knock at the door of the pretty garden-house in Petty France. Her boy, Dick Jones, who was now fifteen, had, like his cousin young Lord Barrymore, been one of Milton’s pupils, and was probably at this very time taking his private lessons with Mr. Milton in preparation for a year at Oxford—to be followed by a foreign tour—with Henry Oldenburg as his tutor. And Lady Ranelagh herself, fired, perhaps, by her brother Robert’s study of Oriental languages, and under Milton’s influence, was taking lessons in Hebrew of a Scottish divine who lodged in Holborn. A year later—some time in October 1656—Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were settled at Oxford, where Dick’s cousins, the Earl of Cork’s two sons, were already at the University,[217] with their tutor, Peter du Moulin, in attendance on them; and all five were basking in the personality of the virtuoso-uncle, Mr. Robert Boyle. Henry Oldenburg and Peter du Moulin were both to become _protégés_ of Robert Boyle.[218] Henry Oldenburg especially was to link himself with the Invisibles and the future Royal Society; and it was probably in the Oxford laboratory that Henry Oldenburg won Robert Boyle’s admiration, and that Dick Jones first learned to dabble in experimental science and earned for himself his uncle’s _sobriquet_, “Pyrophilus.”[219] Meantime, Henry Oldenburg and Dick Jones had kept up a correspondence with Mr. Milton in London, and Milton had written kindly to his “well-beloved Richard.” Milton’s letters to Dick Jones are in Latin, and there is more than a touch of the pedagogue in their tone. It seems likely, in the light of after events, that the brilliant Dick had already caused his mother some uneasiness of mind, and that she hoped much from this year at Oxford, with her brother Robert Boyle as mentor, before Dick and Henry Oldenburg set out on their foreign tour. In October 1656 Lady Ranelagh was herself in Oxford: she had taken it on her way to Ireland, whither she was bound on a long visit, with her daughters, servants, and eight horses.[220] And she had brought with her to Oxford a letter from Mr. Milton to her son Dick. The blind secretary, left behind in London, was missing Lady Ranelagh’s frequent kindly knock at the door of the garden-house in Petty France— “And now your most excellent mother,” Milton wrote to Dick Jones at Oxford, “on her way to Ireland, whose departure ought to be a matter of no ordinary regret to both of us (for to me also she has stood in the place of all kith and kin), carries you this letter herself.”