And he concludes his panegyric with the recital of their chiefest fault, “which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is, that there is not enough of them.” The London outside this pleasant coterie was not so congenial to Robert Boyle. Above all, the sects and sectaries were his abomination. They were coming over from Amsterdam like so many bills of exchange; they were like “diurnals,” eagerly read, and then in a day or two torn up as not worth keeping. They were “mushrooms of last night’s coming up.” “If any man have lost his religion,” he wrote, “let him repair to London, and I’ll warrant him he shall find it: I had almost said too, and if any man has a religion, let him but come hither now, and he shall go near to lose it.... For my part, I shall always pray God to give us _the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace_....”[146] One immediate outcome of these club meetings in Wood Street was a little scheme, evidently aided and abetted by Lady Ranelagh, which filled all Robyn’s thoughts on his return to Stalbridge in the spring of 1647. He was going to set up a laboratory of his own, in the empty manor-house. It was a scheme not easy to carry out in those days; and his first efforts were to result in dire failure. “That great earthen furnace,” he wrote to Lady Ranelagh, “whose conveying hither has taken up so much of my care, and concerning which I made bold very lately to trouble you, since I last did so, has been brought to my hands crumbled into as many pieces as we into sects; and all the fine experiments and castles in the air I had built upon its safe arrival have felt the fate of its foundation. Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher’s stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts at chemistry. My limbecks, recipients, and other glasses have escaped indeed the misfortune of their incendiary, but are now, through the miscarriage of that grand implement of Vulcan, as useless to me as good parts to salvation without the fire of zeal. Seriously, Madam, after all the pains I have taken, and the precautions I have used, to prevent this furnace the disasters of its predecessors, to have it transported a thousand miles by land that I may after all this receive it broken, is a defeat that nothing could recompense, but that rare lesson it teaches me, how brittle that happiness is that we build upon earth.”[147] These words breathe the first hint of a melancholy in Robert Boyle’s life, the causes of which—though he did his best to conceal and conquer them—are not far to seek.