Robert Boyle at EtonAuthor(s): Robert BirleySource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Jun., 1960), p. 191Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/531089 .

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I9I

ROBERT BOYLE AT ETON

By ROBERT BIRLEY

N Notes and Records, Vol. 13, No. 2, I referred to a copy of Cicero's

Epistolaefamiliares (i550), which belonged to Robert Boyle when he was a boy at Eton and in which he had scribbled his name. Since then I have discovered two more books in Eton College Library written in by him.

One is a copy of two works of Aristotle bound together, both of the Greek text, the Ethica (Frankfurt, 1584) and the Politica and Oeconomica

(Frankfurt, 1587). On a fly-leaf is written in a childish hand: 'I Robert Boyle doe say Albert Morton is a brave boy.' The other is a copy of two works by Joannis Treminius, a Spanish theologian, also bound together, In Ionae

Prophetiam Commentarii and Commentarii in quatuor priores Duidis Regis, &

Prophetae celeberrimi Psalmos, both published at Oriola in 1623. This was written on a fly-leaf in the same hand: 'Albertus Morton is a most brave & rare boy. 1638.'

Albert Morton was at Eton from 1634 to 1639, first, like Boyle, a commensal of the second table, and then a Colleger. He was the son of Sir Robert Morton, a captain in the Dutch service, and nephew of Albert Morton, who was Sir Henry Wootton's secretary in Venice from 1604 to I615 and was appointed Secretary of State in 1625. He died a few months later, his wife following him very shortly to the grave. On her Wotton wrote what is, perhaps, the most perfect English epitaph:

He first deceased; She for a little tried To live without him: lik'd it not, and died.

The two brothers were Wotton's nephews and the younger Albert Morton was, therefore, his great-nephew. He received the singular honour of being appointed one of the Provost's Executors under his Will, while still a boy at Eton. He was admitted a scholar of King's College, Cambridge, in 1639, but went down in I640 and joined the army in Ireland. That is all that is known of him, except that he was still alive in I660.

It can hardly be supposed that Robert Boyle, when only eleven years old owned copies of Aristotle in Greek and of an obscure Spanish divine. The Tremenius volume is in the same binding as many of John Harrison's scientific books. It looks as though Boyle minor had been scribbling in his Head Master's books.

It is pleasant to think that this little schoolboy joke has at last been washed

up on the shores of time.

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