In 1669, Nell Gwynne was living on the north side, and at the east end, of the Mall, next door to Lady Mary Howard; but in 1671, she crossed over to a house on the Park side of Pall Mall, the leasehold of which had been given her by Charles II; and there, from this time till her death in 1687, “Maddam Elinor Gwyn” was living, only two doors off from Lady Ranelagh and Robert Boyle. Those strips of back gardens, with “raised mounts” in them looking over to the Royal Gardens, were very near together. Did Boyle, whose laboratory was at the back of Lady Ranelagh’s house, see Mrs. Nellie on her mount, talking to the King who stood looking up at her from the green walk below? Evelyn was in attendance that day. “I both saw and heard,” wrote Evelyn afterwards in his diary, “a very familiar discourse between [the King] and Mrs. Nellie, as they cal’d an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and [the King] standing on yᵉ greene walke under it....”[326] But that was in May 1671; and by that time Robert Boyle had been very ill for eleven months, and was only beginning to recover. The year 1669, and part of 1670, had been very busy. Besides his contributions to the Royal Society’s _Transactions_, he had published further work on the _Spring and Weight of the Air_, and a second edition of his _Physiological Essays_. Du Moulin’s translation of the _Devil of Mascon_, with Boyle’s introduction, had appeared; and Boyle was using all his influence, personal and literary, to heal the feud between the Royal Society and the Universities, in which Sprat and Glanville, Stubbe, Crosse, and others, were taking sides. And in 1670 there appeared Boyle’s _Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things_, better known by the delightful title of “Cosmical Suspicions.” Boyle was at this time at the height of his scientific and literary popularity: “Mr. Boiles Styll” meant very much to the intellectual London of that day. It had its disciples, and it had its critics. Evelyn has spoken of “those incumbrances” in it “which now and then render the way a little tedious”; and there were people who thought that in his literary style Mr. Boyle was not quite so happy as in his experiments.[327]