O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme! 
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong, without rage; without o’erflowing, full.

Another Dublin-born man was Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1633-1684).  He had the good fortune to win encomiums both from Dryden and from Pope.  One of his merits, as pointed out by the latter, is that

                      In all Charles’s days
      Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.

He translated from Virgil, Lucan, Horace, and Guarini; wrote prologues, epilogues, and other occasional verses; but is now principally remembered for his poetical Essay on Translated Verse (1681), in which he develops principles previously laid down by Cowley and Denham.  To his credit be it said, he condemns indecency, both as want of sense and bad taste.  He was honored with a funeral in Westminster Abbey.  Johnson records that, at the moment of his death, Roscommon uttered with great energy and devotion the following two lines from his own translation of the Dies Irae: 

      My God, my Father, and my Friend,
      Do not forsake me in my end!

Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the founders of the Royal Society (1662), was son of the “great” Earl of Cork and was born at Lismore, Co.  Waterford.  He takes rank among the principal experimental philosophers of his age, and he certainly rendered valuable services to the advancement of science.  Most of his writings, which are very voluminous, are naturally of a technical character and therefore do not properly belong to literature; but his Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects (1665), a strange mixture of triviality and seriousness, was germinal in this sense that it led to two celebrated jeux d’esprit, namely, Butler’s Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton’s feeling a Dog’s Pulse at Gresham College and Swift’s Pious Meditation upon a Broomstick, in the Style of the Honourable Mr. Boyle.  Indeed, one of Boyle’s Reflections, that “Upon the Eating of Oysters”, is reputed to have rendered a still more signal service to literature, for in its two concluding paragraphs is contained the idea which, under the transforming hand of the master satirist, eventually took the world by storm when it appeared, fully developed, as Gulliver’s Travels.

His brother, Roger Boyle (1621-1679), who figures largely as a soldier and a statesman in Irish and English history under his title of Lord Broghill, was an alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin.  During the Civil War he was a royalist until the death of Charles I., when he changed sides and aided Cromwell materially in his Irish campaign.  When the Lord Protector died, Broghill made another right-about-face, and crossing to his native country worked so energetically and successfully that he made Ireland solid for the restoration of Charles II.  For this service he