stants), was over here in
England, on a fine errand;--namely, had married the fair Elizabeth (14th
February, 1613), James the First's Princess; "Goody Palsgrave," as her
Mother floutingly called her, not liking the connection. What kind of a
"King of Bohemia" this Friedrich made, five or six years after, and what
sea of troubles he and his entered into, we know; the "WINTER-KONIG"
(Winter-King, fallen in times of FROST, or built of mere frost, a
SNOW-king altogether soluble again) is the name he gets in German
Histories. But here is another hook to hang Chronology upon.

This brief Bohemian Kingship had not yet exploded on the Weissenberg
of Prag, [Battle there, Sunday 8th November, 1620.] when old Sir Henry
Wotton being sent as Ambassador "to LIE abroad" (as he wittily called
it, to his cost) in that Business, saw, in the City of Lintz in the
picturesque green country by the shores of the Donau there, an ingenious
person, who is now recognizable as one of the remarkablest of mankind,
Mr. John Kepler, namely: Keplar as Wotton writes him; addressing the
great Lord Bacon (unhappily without strict date of any kind) on that
among other subjects. Mr. John's now ever-memorable watching of those
_ Motions of the Star Mars,_ [_De Motibus Stellae Martis;_ Prag, 1609.]
with "calculations repeated seventy times," and also with Discovery of
the Planetary Laws of this Universe, some, ten years ago, appears to be
unknown to Wotton and Bacon; but there is something else of Mr. John's
devising [It seems, Baptista Porta (of Naples, dead some years before)
must have given him the essential hint,--of whom, or whose hint,
Mr. John does not happen to inform his Excellency at present.] which
deserves attention from an Instaurator of Philosophy:--

"He hath a little black Tent (of what stuff is not much importing),"
says the Ambassador, "which he can suddenly set up where he will in
a Field; and it is convertible (like a windmill) to all quarters at
pleasure; capable of not much more than one man, as I conceive, and
perhaps at no great ease; exactly close and dark,--save at one hole,
about an inch and a half in the diameter, to which he applies a long
perspective Trunk, with the convex glass fitted to the said hole, and
the concave taken out at the other end, which extendeth to about the
middle of this erected Tent: through which the visible radiations of
all the Objects without are intromitted, falling upon a Paper, which
is accommodated to