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BOY honours was another trait that harmonized finely with the preceding. While princes sought to be numbered amongst his correspondents, and his own sovereign more than once pressed upon him the dignity of the peerage, conferred so liberally on all the other members of his family, Robert Boyle, with a wise humility, ever refused such distinctions. He did well! The name of Robert Boyle would shine the less brightly were its lustre lacquered over with a title.

It is not an easy task to arrive at a just estimate of Boyle as a philosopher. To do so we must endeavour to place ourselves in juxtaposition with the age in which he lived, and examine his claims by the light which the knowledge of that age emits. To a forgetfulness of this may be attributed the fact that some modern writers have undervalued him quite as much as his own contemporaries overrated him. Let us remember that his time was that of a transition from the scholastic to the experimental schools—of emergence from the old philosophy, and the following of a new school under the illustrious Bacon. Of this great man, Robert Boyle is justly entitled to be considered the first follower, while he is the predecessor of many great men in the same path—Priestley, Newton, and others; and it is not too much to say that Boyle's discoveries and conjectures gave some light to guide them in the obscure track which they were destined to illuminate with the full effulgence of their genius. The extent, variety, and soundness of Boyle's investigations ranked him amongst the foremost experimental philosophers of his day, and placed natural philosophy on a firm and broad foundation, whereon aftercoming labourers have raised so noble a superstructure. Budgell, the biographer of his family, though often too partial to be taken as a safe guide, says of Robert Boyle, that "he animated philosophy, and put into action what was before little better than speculative science. He lays before us the operations of nature herself, shows the productions of foreign countries, the virtues of plants, ores, and minerals, and all the changes produced in them by different climates. His observations and discoveries in the animal world are no less curious. He has rescued chemistry from the censures it has long lain under, and has shown of what infinite use it is to philosophy when kept within due bounds. He has destroyed several errors in philosophy, and banished the notion of substantial forms by showing the true origin of qualities in bodies." The language of Burnet is not less eulogistic of Boyle as a philosopher, while it places him in a high position as a christian and a scholar. While such may be deemed as expressing the estimate formed of Boyle by his contemporaries, modern philosophers, both at home and abroad, accord to him high praise. Of these we shall name but two: Mr. Sikes, who in his History of the Progress of Physics justly says—"that it is impossible to follow Boyle through his labours without being astonished at the immensity of his resources for wresting her secrets from nature." This testimony to the physicist may be placed beside Dugald Stuart's observations on the metaphysician and theologian, in speaking of two of Boyle's works—the "Inquiry into the vulgar notion of Human Error," and "Whether and how a Naturalist should consider first Causes." "Both these tracts," he says, "display powers which might have placed their author on a level with Descartes and Locke, had not his taste and inclination determined him more strongly to other pursuits. I am inclined to think that neither of them is so well known as were to be wished. I do not even recollect to have seen it anywhere noticed, that some of the most striking and beautiful instances in the order of the material world which occur in the sermons preached at Boyle's lecture, are borrowed from the works of the founder." The works which Boyle has left after him are very numerous, though many others were lost in various ways, and amongst them, as he himself states, by the surreptitious depredations committed on his manuscripts by visitors. A full list of them will be found in Moreri. An abridged edition was published by Dr. Shaw in 3 vols. 4to. In 1677 an imperfect edition was published in Geneva; but in 1744 Dr. Birch superintended the first complete edition in 5 vols. folio, London, to which he prefixed a Life of Boyle. A second edition appeared in 1772.—J. F. W.  BOYLE,, second surviving son of the second earl of Orrery and the Lady Mary Sackville, and grandson of the first earl, was born at Chelsea in 1676. He received his early education in English schools, after which he was entered a student in Christ Church, Oxford, at the age of fifteen, having for his tutors the celebrated Dr. Atterbury and the Rev. Dr. Friend, afterwards master of Westminster school. Notwithstanding his rank, young Boyle applied himself with extraordinary diligence to his studies, so that he attracted the notice and gained the esteem of Dr. Aldrich, the head of the college, who is said to have drawn up his Compendium of Logic for the lad's use, and in his dedication of it to Boyle, he calls him "magnum ædis nostræ ornamentum"—a compliment which, we suspect, was paid to his birth as well as to his talents. While yet a student, his ambition for literary authorship displayed itself in a translation of Plutarch's Life of Lysander, which he published. This was probably undertaken at the suggestion of Dr. Aldrich. In his nineteenth year he edited the Letters of Phalaris, under the patronage of Christ Church, and at the suggestion of Aldrich. The work was undertaken in consequence of Sir William Temple, in his Essay on Ancient Learning, published shortly before, having pronounced them to be superior to any other production of the kind, ancient or modern. There was much reason to believe that these epistles were forgeries, and at all events they are quite unworthy of the extravagant commendation bestowed upon them by Temple, who, it must be confessed, was ill qualified to pronounce upon their genuineness, and dogmatized upon subjects he did not understand. The epistles themselves, and Boyle's edition of them, would probably be long since forgotten, but for the celebrated controversy to which they gave rise, known in literary annals as "Boyle against Bentley." In preparing his work for the press, Boyle was desirous of collating his text with a manuscript in the king's library in London, of which the celebrated Bentley was librarian. As Boyle alleged in the preface to his work, and indeed he is corroborated by the testimony of three others, Bentley refused to leave the manuscript sufficiently long in the hands of the printer for the purposes of collation, and of this Boyle complained somewhat sharply. This brought a contradiction from Bentley, and a rejoinder from Boyle. The question at issue, though itself of little importance, gave rise to one more serious. Bentley quietly waited till the proper time for his revenge arrived. He examined, with all the ability and critical acumen for which he is so deservedly celebrated, these epistles; and having satisfied himself that they were forgeries, he exposed them in a dissertation which he prefixed to the second edition of his friend Dr. Watson's Reflections, published in 1697. Not content with demolishing their authenticity, he assailed the compositions in terms of undeserved depreciation, asserting "that they were nothing more than a fardle of common places, and such a heap of insipid lifeless stuff, that no man of sense and learning would have troubled the world with a new edition of them," and he did not fail to repeat his denial with regard to the manuscript, adding that the edition published by Boyle was a faulty and a foolish one. Bentley's dissertation convinced all impartial readers, but amongst those, of course, Boyle and his friends were not to be found. A rejoinder was published in the name of Boyle, but which was in a great measure the work of Atterbury, Smalridge, the two Friends, and other Oxford men. If this dissertation was deficient in argument, it did not want smartness, sarcasm, and spirit. All the weak points of Bentley are attacked vigorously. Quotations from the epistles are adduced to prove that they are not such stuff as the great Cambridge critic pronounced them to be, but it must be admitted, that in the very outset Boyle betrays his own apprehensions of the untenableness of his position. "I have not," he says in his preface, "anywhere in my book asserted that the epistles which carry Phalaris's name, are genuine; so neither have I, with a decisive and assuming air, pronounced 'em spurious. I expressed myself with caution and reserve in this matter, which I thought became a young writer, who was sensible that the best and ablest judges were divided in their opinions about it, and I thought it would be a very indecent part in me to make myself a judge between 'em." Dr. Garth, too, came to the aid of Boyle, and in his Dispensary paid him a compliment, which is as ludicrous in its gross adulation of Boyle as it is unjust to Bentley:—

And, in fine, the bitter and keen genius of Swift lent his aid in "The Battle of the Books." All this wit and satire and smartness did not fail in its effects, and the mass of readers, who could better appreciate brilliant repartees than sound arguments, extolled this production, and thus the current of popular opinion ran in favour of the Oxonians and against Cambridge and Bentley, and the former indulged in a triumph which must have 