cclamation to enter,
and foretold things which neither he nor anybody else understood. The
Royal Society, he predicted, would soon lead us to the extreme verge of
the globe, and there delight us with a better view of the moon. [184]
Two able and aspiring prelates, Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, and Wilkins,
Bishop of Chester, were conspicuous among the leaders of the movement.
Its history was eloquently written by a younger divine, who was rising
to high distinction in his profession, Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop
of Rochester. Both Chief Justice Hale and Lord Keeper Guildford stole
some hours from the business of their courts to write on hydrostatics.
Indeed it was under the immediate direction of Guildford that the
first barometers ever exposed to sale in London were constructed. [185]
Chemistry divided, for a time, with wine and love, with the stage and
the gaming table, with the intrigues of a courtier and the intrigues
of a demagogue, the attention of the fickle Buckingham. Rupert has the
credit of having invented mezzotinto; from him is named that curious
bubble of glass which has long amused children and puzzled philosophers.
Charles himself had a laboratory at Whitehall, and was far more active
and attentive there than at the council board. It was almost necessary
to the character of a fine gentleman to have something to say about air
pumps and telescopes; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it
becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six to
visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of delight at
finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and that a microscope
really made a fly loom as large as a sparrow. [186]

In this, as in every great stir of the human mind, there was doubtless
something which might well move a smile. It is the universal law that
whatever pursuit, whatever doctrine, becomes fashionable, shall lose a
portion of that dignity which it had possessed while it was confined to
a small but earnest minority, and was loved for its own sake alone. It
is true that the follies of some persons who, without any real
aptitude for science, professed a passion for it, furnished matter of
contemptuous mirth to a few malignant satirists who belonged to the
preceding generation, and were not disposed to unlearn the lore of their
youth. [187] But it is not less true that the great work of interpreting
nature was performed by the English of that age as it had never bef