the most absolute confidence in her judgment; and it is from her letters to him, full of solicitude about his health, and of interest in his experiments and speculations, that we obtain perhaps the best idea of that combination of intellectual and moral excellencies to which her contemporaries felt they could not do justice except by calling her “the incomparable Lady Ranelagh.”  For that name, which was to be hers through an entire generation more, was already as common in talk about her beyond the circle of her own family as the affectionate one of “Sister Ranelagh” was within that circle.  Partly it was because she was one of the best-educated women of her time, with the widest tastes and sympathies in matters literary and philosophical, and with much of that genius of the Boyles, though in feminine form, which was represented by Lord Broghill and Robert Boyle among her brothers.  Just before our present date we find her taking lessons in Hebrew from a Scotch teacher of that language then in London, who afterwards dedicated his Gate to the Holy Tongue to her, with much respect for her “proficiency in so short a time,” and “amidst so many abstractions as she was surrounded with.”  And so in things of greater grasp.  In writing to her brother Robert her satisfaction with the new Experimental Philosophy which he and others are trying to institute can express itself as a belief that it will “help the considering part of mankind to a clearer prospect into this great frame of the visible world, and therein of the power and wisdom of its great Maker, than the rough draft wherein it has hitherto been represented in the ignorant and wholesale philosophy that has so long, by the power of an implicit faith in the doctrine of Aristotle and the Schools, gone current in the world has ever been able to assist them towards.”  But it was not merely by variety of intellectual culture that Lady Ranelagh was distinguished.  One cannot read her letters without discerning in them a deep foundation of piety in the best sense, real wisdom, a serious determination with herself to make her own life as actively useful as possible, and a disposition always to relate herself to what was sterling around her.  “Though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion,” said Burnet of her long afterwards, “yet her soul was never of a party.  She divided her charities and friendships, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion.”  This was true even at our present date, when she was an Oliverian in politics, like her brother Broghill, though perhaps more moderately so, and in religious matters what may be called a very liberal Puritan.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Birch’s Life of Robert Boyle, prefixed to edition of Boyle’s Works, pp. 27-33; Letters of Boyle to Lady Ranelagh and of Lady Ranelagh to Boyle in Vol.  V. of his Works; Notes by Mr. Crossley to his edition of Worthington’s Diary and Correspondence for the Chetham Society, I. p. 164-165, and 366.  Mrs. Green’s Calendar of State-Papers for 1651, p. 574.]