through this common social connexion of theirs in London has been already discussed.  The Ranelagh circle, for the rest, included all those, or most of them, that were Milton’s friends independently, and could converse about him in her ladyship’s own spirit.  The family of Lord President Lawrence, for example, were in high esteem with Lady Ranelagh; and the President’s son, Mr. Henry Lawrence, Milton’s young friend, and presumably one of his former pupils of the Barbican days, seems to have been about this time much in the company of her ladyship’s nephew, the Earl of Barrimore.  That young nobleman, we may mention, had become a married man, shortly after he had ceased to be Milton’s pupil in the Barbican, and was now leading a gallant and rather idle life about London, but not quite astray from his aunt’s society, or perhaps from Milton’s either.[2] Then there were Hartlib, Durie, Haak, and other lights of the London branch of the Invisible College, friends of Robert Boyle for years past, and corresponding with him and the other luminaries of the Oxford colony of the College.  Hartlib, in particular, who now lived at Charing Gross, and who had found a new theme of interest in the wonderful abilities and wonderful experiments of Mr. Clodius, a German chemist, who had recently become his son-in-law, was still in constant correspondence with Boyle, and was often at Lady Ranelagh’s on some occasion or other.[3] Nor must Milton’s new German friend, Henry Oldenburg, the agent for Bremen, be forgotten.  He also, as we shall find, had been drawn, in a special manner, into the Boyle and Ranelagh connexion, and was, in fact, entering, by means of this connexion, on that part of his interesting career for which he is remembered in the annals of English science.  He was to marry Durie’s only daughter, and be retained by that tie, as well as by others, in the Hartlib-Durie cluster of Milton’s friends.

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Peter Du Moulin was one of Robert Boyle’s friends and correspondents both before and after the Restoration.  It was at Boyle’s request that Du Moulin translated and published in 1658 a little book called The Devil of Mascon, a French story of well-authenticated spirit-rapping; and the book was dedicated by Dumoulin to Boyle, and Boyle contributed an introductory letter to it.  Moreover, it was to Boyle that Du Moulin in 1670 dedicated the first part of his Parerga or Collection of Latin Poems, the second part of which contained his reprint of the Iambics against Milton from the Regii Sanguinis Clamor.—­See Birch’s Life of Boyle, p. 60, and four letters of Du Moulin to Boyle in Boyle’s Works, Vol.  V (pp 594-596).  In three of these letters, all written after the Restoration, Du Moulin presents his respectful services to “My Honourable Lady Ranelagh” in terms implying long-established acquaintanceship.  But there are other scattered proofs of Du Moulin’s long intimacy with the whole Boyle family.]