l years before. Mr. De Morgan communicated the account of the
proposal to Lord Macaulay, who replied that he did not think that any
Englishman _received_ a literary pension from Louis; but that there is a
curious letter, about 1664, from the French Ambassador, in which he says
that he has, by his master's orders, been making inquiries as to the state
of learning in England, and that he is sorry to find that the best writer
is _the infamous Miltonus_. On two such independent testimonies it may be
held proved that the French King had attempted to buy a little adherence
from English literature and science; and the silent contempt of the Royal
Society is an honorable fact in their history.

Another little bit of politics is as follows. Oughtred is informed that
"Mr. Foster,[570] our Lecturer on Astronomy at Gresham College, is put out
because he will not kneel down at the communion-table. A Scotsman [Mungo
Murray], one that is _verbi bis minister_,[571] is now lecturer in Mr.
Foster's place." Ward in his work on the Gresham Professors,[572]
suppresses the reason, and the suppression lowers the character of his
book. Foster was expelled in 1636, and re-elected on a vacancy in 1641,
when Puritanism had gained strength.

The correspondence of Newton would require deeper sifting than could be
given in such an article as the present. The first of the letters (1669) is
curious, as presenting the {311} appearance of forms belonging to the great
calculus which, in this paragraph, we ought to call that of fluxions. We
find, of the date February 18, 1669-70, what we believe is the earliest
manifestation of that morbid part of Newton's temperament which has been so
variously represented. He had solved a problem--being that which we have
called Dary's--on which he writes as follows: "The solution of the annuity
problem, if it will be of any use, you have my leave to insert into the
_Philosophical Transactions_, so it be without my name to it. For I see not
what there is desirable in public esteem, were I able to acquire and
maintain it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I
chiefly study to decline."

Three letters touch upon "the experiment of glass rubbed to cause various
motions in bits of paper underneath": they are supplements to the account
given by Newton to the Royal Society, and printed by Birch. It was Newton,
so far as appears, who added _glass_ to the substances known to be
electric. Soon afterwards