on and the Lord Strategus. Which ballot boxes
were to be green and which red, which balls were to be of gold and which
of silver, which magistrates were to wear hats and which black velvet
caps with peaks, how the mace was to be carried and when the heralds
were to uncover, these, and a hundred more such trifles, were gravely
considered and arranged by men of no common capacity and learning.
[181] But the time for these visions had gone by; and, if any steadfast
republican still continued to amuse himself with them, fear of public
derision and of a criminal information generally induced him to keep
his fancies to himself. It was now unpopular and unsafe to mutter a word
against the fundamental laws of the monarchy: but daring and ingenious
men might indemnify themselves by treating with disdain what had lately
been considered as the fundamental laws of nature. The torrent which
had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another. The
revolutionary spirit, ceasing to operate in politics, began to exert
itself with unprecedented vigour and hardihood in every department
of physics. The year 1660, the era of the restoration of the old
constitution, is also the era from which dates the ascendency of the new
philosophy. In that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent
in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist.
[182] In a few months experimental science became all the mode. The
transfusion of blood, the ponderation of air, the fixation of mercury,
succeeded to that place in the public mind which had been lately
occupied by the controversies of the Rota. Dreams of perfect forms of
government made way for dreams of wings with which men were to fly from
the Tower to the Abbey, and of doublekeeled ships which were never to
founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were hurried along by the
prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and Puritan,
were for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles, princes,
swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy. Poets sang with emulous
fervour the approach of the golden age. Cowley, in lines weighty
with thought and resplendent with wit, urged the chosen seed to take
possession of the promised land flowing with milk and honey, that land
which their great deliverer and lawgiver had seen, as from the summit
of Pisgah, but had not been permitted to enter. [183] Dryden, with more
zeal than knowledge, joined voice to the general a