The treatise _Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God_ appeared in 1685, and _A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature_ in 1686. _The Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus_, written in his youth, was revised and printed in 1687; and about this time Boyle was advertising among the _virtuosi_ for his lost and plagiarised manuscripts, evidently with some intention of bringing out a collected edition of his works. The only collection hitherto had been a very incomplete Latin edition, published without his knowledge in Geneva, in 1677. In 1690 he published his _Medicina Hydrostatica_, and the first part of _The Christian Virtuoso_;[335] and in 1691—the last year of his life—his _Experimenta Observationes Physicæ_. Some of his writings, left with his executors, were to appear posthumously; and he had deposited with the secretaries of the Royal Society a sealed packet containing his account of the making of phosphorus—not to be opened till after his death.[336] A busy life, to the last; but what a quiet life it was for the sister and brother during those last momentous years, in the house in Pall Mall! History swept past them: Kings came and went, Cabinets changed, beautiful faces faded, Parliaments were dissolved, creeds and parties wrangled and plotted, brave men—and women too—died on scaffolds and the gallows-tree and at the stake for political crimes. All the world knows about Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney; but it is sometimes forgotten that Mrs. Lisle, the wife of a regicide, laid her head on the block for “harbouring a rebel”, and that Elizabeth Gaunt, for the same political crime, was burned at Tyburn.[337] A new London grew up over the old ruins—new steeples on old foundations—and fashionable new squares were built where green fields had been. And all the time a great and cumbrous Constitution was raising itself over centuries of abuse and sacrifice—a nation’s blood and tears. Events crowded the canvas: Charles II’s melodramatic ending; the accession of the bigot James II; Monmouth’s rising and execution; the “Bloody Assizes” of Judge Jeffreys, in Dorset and Somerset; James’s league with the French; the revoking of the Edict of Nantes and the horrible atrocities that followed. Catholicism spread its fibres throughout England, permeating Army, Law Courts, Parliament and University. Priests—Carmelites, Benedictines and Franciscans—walked about the streets of London, and a huge Jesuit school was set up in the Savoy. In Scotland, a Catholic was in command at Edinburgh Castle: in Ireland, a Catholic was at the head of the Army, and thousands of Catholic Irish were drafted into its ranks.[338]