Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib—“during my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me.” Friends and neighbours came about him; these were certain “young knights” and young Churchmen and “travellers out of France,” who appear under fancy names in his _Reflections_: Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and Genorio, “Travellers and fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth, both well born and well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at Stalbridge, Robyn “took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me at the occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may have been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still figures in some of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them of “Mr. Boyle”—even while he is using also the first personal pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s family at Sherborne Castle were pleasant neighbours, and the family of Sir Thomas Mallet, at Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John Mallet their son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the fair young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.