But Boyle spent his money also in helping individual cases—people whose lots were less happy than he thought they deserved; poor hard-worked clergy; the “distress’d refugees of France and Ireland”; and “learned men who were put to wrestle with necessities.” He did this, very quietly, for many years—usually by the hands of one or two personal friends in whose discretion he could trust. Gilbert Burnet, in those latter years, was one of these friends; and Burnet’s own _History of the Reformation_ would never have been published without Boyle’s assistance. So quietly did Boyle dispense his charities that sometimes the very men so helped did not know from whence the help came; but Burnet says that for years Boyle spent on this form of charity more than £1000 a year, which would mean more than three times that sum to-day. And he gave impartially, without thought of race or creed, holding himself to be “a part of the human nature, a debtor to the whole race of men.” Perhaps his especial _protégés_ were those who had suffered for their religious and political convictions. A story of any kind of persecution would bring a flush of anger and distress to his gentle face, and words of the deepest indignation to lips which rarely opened to “speak against men.” Each year saw the publication of new tracts and treatises, and revised editions. They follow each other almost too quickly for enumeration. His _Discourse of Things above Reason: inquiring whether a philosopher should admit there are any such_, appeared in 1681; his _Memoirs of the Natural History of the Human Blood_, in 1684. That was the winter of the Great Frost, 1683-4, when all London bivouacked and made merry on the frozen Thames, and the smallpox was “very mortall.” It must have been a trying winter for the invalid philosopher; for London “by reason of the excessive coldnesse of the aire hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so fill’d with the fuliginous steame of the sea-coale that hardly could one see crosse the streetes, and thro’ filling the lungs with its grosse particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarcely breathe.”[334] And there was no water to be had from pipes or engines; the birds and beasts died in the parks, the breweries were at a standstill, and fuel was exorbitantly dear.