facts, follows truth most of all, and not his own fancy or conjecture, he fulfils his proper duty.  I would add also that characteristic of Sallust, in respect of which he himself chiefly praised Cato,—­to be able to throw off a great deal in few words:  a thing which I think no one can do without the sharpest judgment and a certain temperance at the same time.  There are many in whom you will not miss either elegance of style or abundance of information; but for conjunction of brevity with abundance, i.e. for the despatch of much in few words, the chief of the Latins, in my judgment, is Sallust.  Such are the qualities that I think should be in the Historian that would hope to make his expressions proportional to the facts he records.

“But why all this to you, who are sufficient, with the talent you have, to make it all out, and who, if you persevere in the road you have entered, will soon be able to consult no one more learned than yourself.  That you do persevere, though you require no one’s advice for that, yet, that I may not seem to have altogether failed in replying correspondingly with the value you are pleased to put upon my authority with you, is my earnest exhortation and suggestion.  Farewell; and all success to your real worth, and your zeal for acquiring wisdom.

  “Westminster:  July 15, 1657.”

Henry Oldenburg, and his pupil Richard Jones, alias young Ranelagh, had left Oxford in April or May 1657, after about a year’s stay there, and had gone abroad on a tour which was to extend over more than four years.  It was an arrangement for the farther education of young Ranelagh in the way most satisfactory to his mother, Lady Ranelagh, and perhaps also to his uncle, Robert Boyle, neither of whom seems to have cared much for the ordinary University routine; and particulars had been settled by correspondence between Oldenburg at Oxford and Lady Ranelagh in Ireland.[1] Young Ranelagh, I find, took with him as his servant a David Whitelaw, who had been servant to Durie in his foreign travels:  “my man, David Whitelaw,” as Durie calls him.[2] The ever-convenient Hartlib was to manage the conveyance of letters to the travellers, wherever they might be.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Letter of Oldenburg to Boyle, dated April! 5, 1657, given in Boyle’s Works (V. 299).]

[Footnote 2:  Letters of Durie in Vaughan’s Protectorate (II. 174 and 195).]

[Footnote 3:  Letter of Oldenburg in Boyle’s Works (V. 301).]

They went, pretty directly, to Saumur in the west of France, a pleasant little town, with a college, a library, &c., which they had selected for their first place of residence, rather than Paris.  An Italian master was procured to teach young Jones “something of practical geometry and fortification”; and, for the rest, Oldenburg himself continued to superintend his studies, directing them a good deal in that line of physical and economical observation which might