The rage of the Londoners knew no bounds. England was undone;—with a debauched and lazy Prince and a licentious court; “no council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad.”[314] The very men who had stood in the Strand and blessed God at the Restoration now wished Cromwell back again: “Everybody nowadays,” says Pepys, “reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour Princes fear him.” Towards the end of 1666 Lady Ranelagh was expecting her brother from Oxford to make her a prolonged visit in the house in Pall Mall. And where Robert Boyle was, there must some kind of chemical laboratory be also. “I have ordered Thomas,” she wrote, “to look out for charcoal; and should gladly receive your orders to put my back house in posture to be employed by you, against your coming, that you may lose no time after.”[315] The Royal Society was again holding its meetings;—still, at first, under difficulties, in Gresham College, which was now the Exchequer. Hooke and Croone were both enthusiastic over the “pretty experiments” of transfusion of blood: “one dog filled with another dog’s blood,” is Pepys’s way of expressing it. Croone told Pepys that the performances at Gresham College had given occasion for “many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such-like.” The City was still in a melancholy condition; it was difficult and dangerous to walk about the ruins, with a link, after dark; but the “Greate Streetes” were now being “marked out with piles, drove into the ground”; and people were wondering why so many of the new Churches were to be built “in a cluster about Cornhill.” In January 1667, Gresham College being occupied by the Exchequer, Mr. Henry Howard, one of the Society’s most generous members, put rooms in Arundel House in the Strand at the disposal of the Royal Society— “To the Royal Society,” says Evelyn, “which since the sad conflagration were invited by Mr. Howard to sit at Arundel House in the Strand, who at my instigation likewise bestow’d on the Society that noble library which his grandfather especially and his ancestors had collected. This gentleman had so little inclination to bookes, that it was the preservation of them from imbezzlement.”[316] In May, the meetings of the Society were in full swing: May 30, especially, must have been a gala occasion— “To London,” says Evelyn, “to wait on the Dutchess of Newcastle (who was a mighty pretender to learning, poetrie and philosophie, and had in both publish’d divers bookes) to the Royal Society, whither she came in greate pomp, and being receiv’d by our Lord President at the Dore of our meeting roome, the mace, etc., carried before him, had several experiments shewed to her. I conducted her Grace to her coach, and return’d home.”