asion the
desperate censure "that Mrs. Turner sings worse than my wife."

His interest in science is as curious and miscellaneous as his interest
in everything else. He was indeed President of the Royal Society of his
time, and he is immensely delighted with Boyle and his new discoveries
concerning colours and hydrostatics. Yet so rare a dilettante is he,
in this as in other things, that we find this President of the Royal
Society bringing in a man to teach him the multiplication table. He has
no great head for figures, and we find him listening to long lectures
upon abstruse financial questions, not unlike the bimetallism
discussions of our own day, which he finds so clear, while he is
listening, that nothing could be clearer, but half an hour afterwards he
does not know anything whatever about the subject.

Under the category of his amusements, physic must be included; for, like
other egoists, he was immensely interested in his real or imaginary
ailments, and in the means which were taken to cure them. On some days
he will sit all day long taking physic. He derives an immense amount of
amusement from the process of doctoring himself, and still more from
writing down in all their detail both his symptoms and their treatment.
His pharmacopoeia is by no means scientific, for he includes within it
charms which will cure one of anything, and he always keeps a hare's
foot by him, and will sometimes tell of troubles which came to him
because he had forgotten it.

He is constantly passing the shrewdest of judgments upon men and things,
or retailing them from the lips of others. "Sir Ellis Layton is, for a
speech of forty words, the wittiest man that ever I knew in my life, but
longer he is nothing." "Mighty merry to see how plainly my Lord and Povy
do abuse one another about their accounts, each thinking the other a
fool, and I thinking they were not either of them, in that point, much
in the wrong." "How little merit do prevail in the world, but only
favour; and that, for myself, chance without merit brought me in; and
that diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many
lazy people that the diligent man becomes necessary, that they cannot do
anything without him." "To the Cocke-pitt where I hear the Duke of
Albemarle's chaplain make a simple sermon: among other things,
reproaching the imperfection of humane learning, he cried, 'All our
physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is