Boyle’s old friend, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Mathematics, was equally distressed. In fact, he wrote about it to Mr. Boyle in London. Wallis had been one of those who objected to the fulsome wording of the proposed letter of thanks from the University to the Archbishop—a letter acknowledging Sheldon as their “Creator and Redeemer”: _non tantus condere, hoc est creare, sed etiam redimere_.[322] And he was as angry with the University Orator’s attack on “Cromwell, fanatics, the Royal Society and the New Philosophy,” as he was at the abominable scurrilities of the University Buffoone. Real stage-plays, too, imported from the Duke’s House, had been acted in the Oxford Town Hall—and were less objectionable than what had gone on in the Sheldonian. But even Wallis seems to have been infected by the summer madness of that _Encænia_ of 1669. He had been entertaining some of the guests at his own house; Sir James Langham and his Lady, and other “persons of quality”; and in an after-dinner chat Sir James had been expatiating on the qualities of “an excellent lady,” Lady Mary Hastings, sister to the Earl of Huntingdon—a lady for whom Sir James had a very great esteem. So highly, indeed, did he think of “her temper, her parts, her worth, her virtue, her piety and everything else,” that he would have been quite willing to marry her himself except that she was his deceased wife’s sister, and that he was already married again. But Sir James thought—and Wallis concurred with him—that Lady Mary would make “not only an excellent wife, but an excellent wife for Esquire Boyle.” And Wallis wrote then and there to Boyle to offer to be “the happy instrument of making two so excellent persons happy in each other.” Wallis may in his youth have studied cryptology; but in his middle age he did not understand Robert Boyle. Lady Mary Hastings probably never knew of the future that had been so neatly mapped out for her in that after-dinner chat. She married Sir William Joliffe, of Caverswell Castle, in Staffordshire. The Manor of Stalbridge stood empty; and Mr. Boyle went on living in Pall Mall. But if Oxford was changed of late years, so also was Pall Mall—very much changed indeed since a certain dark evening of 1649, when Cromwell’s “sightly lieutenant,” carrying the message to Broghill, rode up to Lady Ranelagh’s door. One of the first things that Charles II had done was to make a new Mall in St. James’s Park, and to improve the Park itself—“now every day more and more pleasant by the new works upon it,” wrote Pepys in January 1662. A river was made through the Park; and there on frosty winter days Pepys stood to watch the gay groups “sliding with their skeates—which is a very pretty art.” The Duke of York was an accomplished skater, and the King was a great hand at the game of Mall.