enrols the best and worthiest of England's scien

tists.

I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President now; yet it would appear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of some of his best imitations.

When he died it was in the early years of the eighteenth century - he left his books, manuscripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen College, Cambridge; and there, as I said. when we first came upon his name, his famous Diary, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more than a hundred years.

A Scientist.

Science was making a push for itself in these times. Newton had discovered the law of gravitation before Charles II. died; the King himself was no bad dabbler in chemistry.

Robert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Royal Society I spoke of; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes -devoting his fortune to worthy works; estimable in private life; dignified and serene; tall in person and spare wearing, like every other well-born Londoner, the curled, long-bottomed wig of France, and making sentences in exposition of his thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample. He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully constructed; and this is the way he says it:

"To be told that an eye is the organ of sight, and that this is performed by that faculty of the mind which, from its function, is called visive, will give a man but a sorry ac

count of the instruments and manner of vision itself, or of the knowledge of that Opificer who, as the Scripture speaks, formed the eye; and he that can take up with this easy theory of Vision, will not think it necessary to take the pains to dissect the eyes of animals, nor study the books of mathematicians to understand Vision; and accordingly will have but mean thoughts of the contrivance of the Organ, and the skill of the Artificer, in comparison of the ideas that will be suggested of both of them to him, that being profoundly skilled in anatomy and optics, by their help takes asunder the several coats, humors, muscles, of which that exquisite dioptrical instrument consists; and having separately considered the size, figure, consistence, texture, diaphaneity or opacity, situation, and connection of each of them, and their coaptation in the whole eye, shall discover, by the help of the laws of optics, how admirably this little organ is fitted to receive the incident beams of light and dispose them in the best manner possible for completing the lively representation of the almost infinitely various objects of sight."

What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Royal Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal), is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Samuel Pepys wrote his Diary?

John Bunyan.

I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the Restoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for this morning.

Buckingham,

I think he did never wear a wig. who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have in mind: it is John Bunyan.* Not a great name then; so vulgar a one indeed that a good many years later— the

*B. 1628; d. 1688. Editions of the Pilgrim's Progress are innumerable. Southey and Macaulay have dealt with his biography, and in later times Mr. Froude ("English Men of Letters ") and John Brown (8vo, London, 1885).

amiable poet Cowper spoke of it charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken.

He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bedford, amid fat green meadows, beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom. You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland Railway; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under Bunyan's eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow-a mile-long road-to the grammar-school at Bedford.

The trees are beautiful thereabout; the grass is as green as emerald; old cottages are mossy and picturesque; gray towers of churches hang out a great wealth of ivy boughs; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees that shade country houses.

The aspects have not changed much in all these years; even the cottage of Bunyan's tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The boy