Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/139

 .' Sir William's name also frequently occurs amongst those present at the gatherings—so faithfully recorded by Pepys—at the coffee-house, where the leaders in science, literature, and politics, used to assemble and discuss the topics of the day. The celebrated Diary depicts him the centre of a brilliant group, kept constantly alive by his discourse, enriched as it was by a varied experience of life, and seasoned by the flavour of paradox and the satirical gifts which, in the practical affairs of life, had already been the cause of trouble to him, and were to be so again; but in these meetings struck no rankling wound, where they only played round the genial souls of Pepys and his chosen friends, instead of hurtling down in an iron hail on the obnoxious head of Sir Hierome Sankey and his Anabaptist allies.

' January 11, 1664.—To the coffee-house, whither came Sir William Petty and Captain Graunt, and we fell to talke of musique, the universal character, art of memory, prayers, counterfeiting of hands, and other most excellent discourses to my great content, having not been in so good a company a great while.

' January 27, 1664.—At the coffee-house, where I sat with Sir S. Ascue and Sir William Petty, who in discourse is methinks one of the most rational men that ever I heard speak with a tongue, having all his notions the most distinct and clear, and among other things saying that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for within the world: "Religio Medici," "Osborne's Advice to a Son," and "Hudibras;" did say that in these—in the two first principally—the wit lies; and confirming some pretty sayings—which are generally like paradoxes—by some argument smartly and pleasantly urged, which takes with people who do not trouble themselves to examine the force of an argument which pleases them in the delivery, upon a subject which they like—whereas by many particular instances of mine, and others out of "Osborne," he did really find fault and weaken the strength