Burlington—Orrery—Shannon. Robert Boyle, in Oxford, was, of all the great Earl’s sons surviving, to remain “Mr. Boyle”—a virtuoso and an “Honourable Person.” He could have been a peer, he could have been a bishop, he could have been Provost of Eton. It is said he repeatedly refused a peerage. He certainly, not long after the Restoration, declined to take Orders with a view to a Bishopric. “He was treated with great civility and respect,” says Birch, “by the King as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” But to Robert Boyle the heirdom of a great family was “but a glittering kind of slavery,” and “titular greatness” seemed to him “an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths.”[246] He believed that the less he participated in the patrimonies of the Church the more influence he should have in things religious. And besides—as he explained in after years to Bishop Burnet—he had felt “no inward motion to it by the Holy Ghost.” For the same reason he would not be Provost of Eton. How little Sir Henry Wotton, sitting on the bank by Black Pots in the company of Izaak Walton, could have foreseen that the “Spiritay Robyn” would one day be asked to be his successor as Provost of Eton! Robert Boyle had chosen his way of life: he desired to be free to pursue knowledge for the good of mankind in the service of God. He would not fetter himself by tests and oaths; he could not alter his character. He had, as he himself expresses it, “a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.”[247] And so there is no record of him in the Matted Gallery, no glimpse of him in lawn sleeves, or with diamond hatband among the Courtiers, or among the nice critics of the Restoration Drama, who no longer cared for Shakespeare: “I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played,” says Evelyn,[248] “but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesties being so long abroad.” It is extremely doubtful if Robert Boyle ever witnessed a performance of “dear Broghill’s” _Mustapha_, even when Betterton and Ianthe took the chief parts, and the King and Lady Castlemaine, and “pretty witty Nell” were there to see it.[249]