Then followed an account of Sir Henry Wotton’s kind reception of the boys, and the lending of his furnished chamber till their own should be ready: “We injoy it yett,” says Carew, “which is a great favor.” The boys had dined several times already with Sir Henry Wotton. They were very “jocond”, although they showed a “studious desire”, and they had “very carefull and reverend masters.” There is just a hint of home-sickness, a longing for the sight of the old Earl and the brothers and sisters and the roughly splendid Irish life; but Carew quickly goes on to tell the “Order of the Colledge,” especially “touching my young masters’ essence.” The boys dine in hall, with the rest of the boarders;[38] and the Earl of Northampton’s four sons, and the two sons of the Earl of Peterborough, with other “Knights’ sons” are at the same table. “They sitt permiscously—noe observing of place or qualitie”; and at night they supped in their own rooms, Mr. Francis and Mr. Robert supping with the Earl of Peterborough’s sons, providing, of course, their own commons. Carew mentions the “fasting nights” and the fact that the College allows no meat to be cooked on Fridays or Saturdays; and he hints that the College commissariat requires a good deal of supplementing. Master Robert is too busy with his lessons to write a letter, but sends his love and duty: “They are upp every morning at half an hour afore 6, and soe to scoole to prayers.” Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton[39] of that day, was nearing the end of his eventful, chequered life when Robert Boyle, not yet nine years old, came under his care. He was indeed a contemporary of the old Earl, and a Kentish man as well—one of a fine old Kentish stock; but no two men could have been more unlike. He had taken his B.A. at Oxford, and with a slender purse set out on his seven years’ wanderings in European cities, the very same year in which Mr. Richard Boyle had turned the lucky ring on his finger and landed on Irish shores. But that had been forty-seven years before—back in the mists; and the years between those youthful wanderings and this pleasant old age in the Provost’s lodging at Eton had been years of risky secret missions and ill-paid political intrigue. He had been private secretary to Essex in London, private correspondent abroad, Ambassador at Venice. In those years, many a fine intellect with big ambitions had gone under. Sir Henry had come off better than many, in spite of his slender means and an undeniable weakness for libraries and laboratories and picture galleries in the intervals of diplomacy. It was he who had been sent by the Duke of Tuscany on the secret mission to Edinburgh to tell James VI that he was going to be poisoned, and to carry with him the little packet of Italian antidotes, not known at that time in the Scottish pharmacopœia. He had stayed three months with the Scottish King; and no wonder that when James ascended the throne of