“THOMAS HOBBES TO (THE EARL OF NEWCASTLE).
“PARIS. 1636, JULY 29. I am sorry your Lordship finds not so good dealing in the world as you deserve. But my Lord, he that will venture to sea must resolve to endure all weather, but for my part I love to keepe a’land. And it may be your Lordship now will do so to, whereby I may have the happinesse which your Lordship partly promises me in the end of your letter, to conferre meditations for a good time together, which will be not onely honor to me, but that happinesse which I and all that are in love with knowledge, use to fancy to themselves for the true happinesse in this life.”
“Mr. Payne willed me to go to Mr. Warner who lives but eight miles off, to get his answer to certayne letters of his, but one while the frost, and at other times the flouds, made the wayes impassable for any but very ranke riders, of which I was never any. I have a cold that makes me keepe my chamber, and a chamber—in this thronge of company that stay Christmas here—that makes me keepe my cold.”
The greater part of the letters of Hobbes consists of disquisitions upon certain matters connected with optics, and especially upon some experiments made by Warner. They go far to show that Newcastle was interested in science, as well as in literature, pictures, and music. Hobbes also frequently expresses pleasant anticipations of discussions on philosophy with Newcastle when he shall visit him at Welbeck.
Another, and an even better-known philosopher, Des Cartes, is said to have been a friend of Newcastle. Surely Walpole was too severe when he accused a companion of Des Cartes and Hobbes of “accommodating his mind to the utmost idleness of literature”.
Newcastle seems to have made scientific experiments on his own account. In a Preface which he wrote to his wife’s _Philosophical and Physical Opinions_, he says: “Dr. Payne, a divine and my chaplain, who hath a very witty, searching brain of his own, being at my house at Bolsover, locked up with me in a chamber to make Lapis Prunellae, which is saltpetre and brimstone[168] inflamed, looking at it a while, I said, Mark it, Mr. Payne, the flame is pale like the sun and hath a violent motion in it, like the sun; saith he, It is so, and the more to confirm you, says he, look what abundance of little suns, round the globe, appear to us everywhere, just the same motion as the sun makes in every one’s eyes. So we concluded the sun could be nothing else but a very solid body of salt and sulphur, inflamed by his own violent motion upon his own axis.”