So popular were Mr. Boyle’s cosmopolitan receptions that about the year 1689 he was obliged to put a “board” on the door in Pall Mall, mentioning the days on which he was “at home.” And he actually printed an announcement, beginning “Mr. Boyle finds himself obliged to intimate to those of his friends and acquaintances who are wont to do him the honour of visiting him,” and going on to explain that his “skilful and friendly physician, seconded by his best friends”, had strongly advised him not to see quite so many people.[345] The forenoons of Tuesdays and Fridays, therefore, “both foreign post-days,” and the afternoons of Wednesdays and Saturdays, he proposed in future to reserve for himself, “that he might have some time, both to recruit his spirits, to range his papers and fill up the _lacunæ_ of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered, and have their face often changed by the public calamities there.”[346] The announcement seems to have had the desired effect. “The mornings,” says Evelyn in his description of the daily routine of Boyle’s last years, “after his private devotions, he usually spent in philosophic studys and in his laboratory, sometimes extending them to night.” But he told Evelyn he had quite given up reading by candle-light, on account of his eyes. His amanuensis used to read to him, and write from notes, or at his dictation; and “that so often in loose papers, pack’d up without method, as made him sometimes to seeke upon occasion, as himself confesses in divers of his works.” And apparently Boyle was not more tidy than other learned men. “Glasses, potts, chymical and mathematical instruments, books and bundles of papers, did so fill and crowd his bedchamber, that there was but just room for a few chaires, so as his whole equipage was very philosophical, without formality.” Among the other rooms in the house there was a small library. Boyle did not want more: “as learning more from men, real experiments, and in his laboratory (which was ample and well furnished) than from books.”[347] And the man himself, in these last years? He was “rather tall, and slender of stature, pale, and much emaciated.” Owing to his delicacy of constitution, “he had divers sorts of cloaks to put on when he went abroad, and in this he governed himself by his thermometer.” His little difficulty of speech had never quite forsaken him. “In his first addresses, being to speake or answer,” says Evelyn, “he did sometimes a little hesitate, rather than stam’er or repeate the same word; imputable to an infirmity which, since my remembrance, he had exceedingly overcome. This, as it made him somewhat slow and deliberate, so after the first effort, he proceeded without the least interruption in his discourse.”[348]