Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/66

 original quarrel, and he now simply regarded himself as a servant of the State called upon to perform a definite duty.

While he disapproved much of what had been done, his work, he thought, would at least prove of permanent advantage to the nation, and the nature of it appealed to his imagination and his scientific tastes. He entered on his gigantic task, thinking that besides his pay 'he should receive monumentall thanks, and not sufficiently considering,' as experience taught him, 'that too great merit is more often paid with envy than with condign reward.' When it had been completed he looked forward to returning to the study of natural philosophy, thinking his present task 'might prove rather an unbending than a breaking of that bow.' 'I also hoped,' he wrote, 'to enlarge my trade of experiments from bodies to minds, from the emotions of the one to the manners of the other; thereby to have understood passions as well as fermentations, and consequently to have been as pleasant a companion to my ingenious friends as if such an intermission from physic had never been.' In this last respect, at least, he was fully gratified, and in after years, still harping on his favourite analogies from the field of medicine, he said he had in this business 'gotten the occasion of practising on his own moralls; that is, to learn how, with smiles and silence, to elude the sharpest provocation, and without troublesome menstruums, to digest the roughest injuries that ever a poor man was crammed with.' A watchful rival was watching his footsteps, to whom perhaps in some respects he had been unfair, and whose powers of mischief, like his abilities, he rated too meanly. This rival had influential friends amongst the extreme religious fanatics of the Anabaptist connection, who hated the Doctor as an unsound theologian, and also among the eager gang of military claimants who were ready to plunder the State which they professed to serve, expecting the officers of the survey to connive at their misdeeds, and ready to be revenged on them if met with resistance. Such was the position. For better or for worse, Dr. Petty was now about to leave the calm life of