Poor Evelyn, bereft of his Church services, lamenting that there was “no more notice taken of Christmas Day in our Churches,” smuggling a Clergyman into his house at Deptford to administer the Sacrament, or stealing up to receive it in Dr. Wild’s lodging in Fleet Street, could yet not resist going to look at the new warship in the dock; to hear Dr. Wilkins preach before the Lord Mayor in St. Paul’s, a very common-sense sermon on the superiority of obedience to sacrifice; to stare at the proud and melancholy Quakers who were hunger-striking in prison; and even to peep into Whitehall itself, now “very glorious and well-furnished” for the Protector. It was no doubt Evelyn’s many-sidedness that made life bearable in what to him was “a dangerous and treacherous time.” Ships and prisons and persecuted clergy, rare jewels, miniatures, “achates and intalias,” carved wood, other people’s houses and gardens and picture-galleries, the “incomparable pieces” that he loved to look at, and the incomparable performances of violin and theorbo and human voice that he loved to listen to—these were the things that made Evelyn happy, and his _Diary_ so fascinating. Above all, perhaps, his passion was for “curiosities.” He was almost as “universally curious” as Dr. Wilkins of Wadham himself. Those were red-letter days when he could examine a clock, whose sole balance was a crystal ball sliding on parallel wires, or a _Terrella_, showing all the magnetical deviations, or an elixir, or a perspective, or a way-wiser, or the charring of sea-coal; or when he had a glimpse into the “elaboratory” of an aristocratic friend, or a gossip about all and sundry with worthy Mr. Hartlib or Dr. Wilkins himself. It may have been Wilkins or it may have been Hartlib who, in the spring of 1656, brought Boyle and Evelyn together.[222] The good Hartlib was a friend of both. Robert Boyle was then in London; but whether or no to hear Wilkins’s sermon in St. Paul’s on the Superiority of Conformity to Sacrifice, is not recorded. In April, at any rate, the acquaintance between Evelyn and Boyle had begun, and Boyle and Wilkins were guests at a little dinner-party given by Evelyn at Sayes Court. It was then that Evelyn presented Wilkins with his “rare burning-glass,” in return, probably, for the beehive that Wilkins had given him during that visit to Oxford in 1654. And after dinner, the little company adjourned to look at Colonel Blount’s “new-invented plows.”