In diet and in habit, Robert Boyle was “extreamely temperate and plaine”; nor could Evelyn, in all their friendship, ever discover in him “the least passion, transport, or censoriousnesse, whatever discourse, or the times, suggested: “All was tranquil, easy, serious, discreete and profitable, so as besides Mr. Hobbes, whose hand was against everybody and admired nothing but his owne, Francis Linus excepted (who yet with much civility wrote against him), I do not remember he had the least antagonist.”[349] The brother and sister had both been ill in the late autumn of 1691, when Boyle wrote to Dr. Turberville at Salisbury, begging for a further prescription for his eyes. “Sight is a thing dear to all men,” he wrote, almost apologetically, “and especially to studious persons.” His eyes had been troubling him very much of late, especially by candle-light. “When the candles are newly snuffed,” wrote this great experimental philosopher, “I see far better for a little while:” but they very soon wanted snuffing again.[350] Evelyn was out of town on December 23, when Lady Ranelagh died; and he did not hear of her death, or of her brother’s serious illness immediately after it, till it was too late. “For it was then,” says Evelyn, “he began evidently to droope apace.” When Evelyn returned to town, it was to stand by his old friend’s grave. Robert Boyle had survived his sister only seven days: he died on December 30, 1691. He was buried near to Lady Ranelagh, in the Chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.[351] Burnet, now Bishop of Salisbury, preached the funeral sermon “with that eloquence natural to him on such and all other occasions,” taking for his text the words, “For God giveth to a man that is good in His sight, wisdom, and knowledge, and joy.”[352] “Something too,” says Evelyn, “was touched of his sister, the Lady Ranelagh.” But indeed it was not necessary. Her intellect and character were known to all those who stood about the grave. Her high standards and strong judgment would have been a gain to the statecraft of her day. But she was a woman; and if for more than twenty years her life had been a rich and beautiful thing as the sister of Robert Boyle, for nearly forty years before that she had been the brave but unhappy wife of Arthur Jones—“the foulest churl in the Worlde.” By Boyle’s own direction, his funeral was “without the least pomp”; but round his grave there stood, besides his own many relatives, “a greate appearance of persons of the best and noblest quality.”