SOURCE: “‘Living and Speaking Statues’: Domesticating Epicurus,” in The Material World: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 140-79.

[In this excerpt from his study of literature and culture in Restoration England, Kroll argues for Gassendi's importance to the importation of Epicureanism into England. Emphasizing motifs of circulation, the critic demonstrates the influence of not only Gassendi's written works, but also the symbolic figure of Gassendi himself.]

If Galilaeus with his new found glass,
Former Invention doth so far surpass,
By bringing distant bodies to our sight,
And make it judge their shape by neerer light,
How much have you oblig'd us? In whose mind
Y'have coucht that Cataract w(ch) made us blind,
And given our soul and optick can descrie
Not things alone, but where their causes lie?
Lucretius Englished, Natures great Code
And Digest too, where her deep Laws
so show'd,
That what we thought mysteriously perplext
Translated thus, both Comment is
and Text

Sir Richard Browne, “On My Son Evelyns Translation of the First Book of Lucretius” (1656)

Cartesius reckoned to see before he died the sentiments of all philosophers, like so many lesser stars in his romantic system, wrapped and drawn within his own vortex.

Jonathan Swift, The Tale of a Tub (1710)

TRANSLATING AND DOMESTICATING EPICURUS

In 1656 John Evelyn published the first English translation of Lucretius.¹ His “Animadversions upon the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura” (appended to that pioneering translation) refers Evelyn's reader by a marginal gloss to Gassendi's life of Epicurus (De Vita et Moribus Epicuri [1647]). Paraphrasing Diogenes Laertius, Evelyn writes that Epicurus “was a person of super-excellent candor and integrity, as testified by his Countrey in general; the costly Statues, and glorious Inscriptions erected to his memory; his many Friends and Disciples; and lastly, that promiscua erga omnis benevolentia; nay, and (what the Reader little expected) even his Religion and Charity.”²

Evelyn reminds us that Epicureanism sustained itself after the death of its master by referring to the memorial inscriptions dedicated to Epicurus. And Gassendi's and Bougerel's textualization of the self continues that tradition. Similarly, Evelyn could well be commenting on his own text, which serves as a kind of epitaph for Gassendi. Indeed—anticipating Bougerel—Evelyn concludes his translation with a printed fascimile of Gassendi's epitaph (p. 136). Evelyn's famous translation of Lucretius appeared less than a year after Gassendi's death in 1655: even the title of the “Animadversions” fortuitously echoes the title of one of Gassendi's two most important neo-Epicurean works.³ The gesture toward Gassendi's Animadversiones in Decimum Librum Diogenes Laertii (originally published in 1649 and only fragmentarily reproduced in the 1658 Opera Omnia) seeks to remind us not only of Gassendi's revision of Epicurus but also of his more comprehensive schemes to construct his own Syntagma.⁴ Thus by translating book one of De Rerum Natura with its speculative physics, Evelyn not only propagates Lucretius's sublime understanding of “the Principles of things”⁵ but also reminds his compatriots of Gassendi's neo-Epicurean cosmology.

In 1657, only a year after Evelyn's translation of Lucretius, William Rand translated Gassendi's important Viri Illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, his life of Peiresc issued in English as The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility. Rand's dedication celebrates Evelyn, whom Rand associates with Gassendi's neo-Epicurean ethos. And just as Gassendi saw in Peiresc an anticipation of the ideal Epicurean gentleman and scholar, so Rand depicts Evelyn as an English version of the same “Peireskian Vertues.”⁶ Rand concludes his dedication to Evelyn by celebrating Mary Evelyn. In the hope that the Evelyns' offspring will generate a newly reformed English gentry, Rand beseeches “Almighty God to make you the happy and joyful Parents of many faire, wise, and well-bred Children, that may tread in their Parents steps, and as living and speaking Statues, effectually present your names and vertues to succeeding Generations.”⁷

Evelyn and Rand evidently conceive of the transmission of culture (here spoken of as “vertue”) as a process by which an image becomes over time a kind of archaeological counter or coin, which it is the purpose of texts—such as Peiresc's antiquarian endeavors—to secure against dissolution. This view applies equally to Epicurean inscriptions, Peiresc's biography, Gassendi's epitaph, or Evelyn's children, whom Rand imagines as “speaking Statues” conveying Evelyn's virtues to later generations. Accordingly, Rand carefully links Gassendi's deliberations on history to Peiresc's fascination with its concrete (as opposed to merely verbal) remnants: whereas “Philosophy instructs men indeed with words, … History inflames them with examples.”⁸ And the exemplary force of historical knowledge is only fully realized by an essential supplement to textual evidences, what Peiresc saw as the “incorrupted witnesses of antiquity”—namely, “Charters, Letters, Seales, Coates of Arms, Inscriptions, Coins and other such like things.”⁹ The attitude is perfectly captured in the specular image of Peiresc “looking through certain spectacles of Augmenting glasses upon Papers and Coins, whose letters were exceedingly small, and half eaten away.”¹⁰ Just as this biography is intended, for the similarly attentive reader, as a “Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility,” so “by Statues and Coins” (Peiresc would retort to his detractors) “we may know what was the Countenance and habit of renowned men and illustrious women, whose actions we delight to hear related.”¹¹ Antiquarian ideals such as Peiresc's predicate Rand's striking invocation of a statuary trope to prophesy Evelyn's propagation of knowledge and virtue.

Evelyn's and Rand's two translations indicate the extent to which Gassendi played a catalytic role in the development of a specifically English neo-Epicureanism. This role has been misunderstood, because, as I have already argued, Gassendi has usually been treated either as a contributor to mid-seventeenth-century European atomism (taken as the most marketable product of the neo-Epicurean revival) or as a figure in the development of European libertinism and free thought. By restricting its field of focus, either genealogy unnecessarily distorts the historical picture. If we separate Gassendi's physics from his larger cultural program, we fragment the coherence of his writings and in so doing allow more powerful claims to ‘scientific’ influence on British natural philosophy to dominate the discussion. Descartes's enormous modern reputation, for one, is always in danger of blocking our vision.¹²

More importantly perhaps, neoclassical thinkers often sought to absorb and domesticate their intellectual debts silently. Consequently, to measure the effect of a given cultural figure, we must examine methodological rather than purely thematic issues. For example, without explicitly referring to him, Dryden's epistle to Charleton uses Epicurus to exorcize Aristotle from its new discursive polity: Epicurus authorizes the contingent modes of apprehension the poem enacts, which themselves connote an epistemology that resists Aristotle's.

An equally frequent and misleading habit is the tendency of seventeenth-century writers to refer to figures of intellectual authority for purely polemical purposes. For example, if we examine the figure of Descartes in the Vanity of Dogmatizing for the epistemological and methodological role he plays in Glanvill's text, we discover that he acts out a part that in its details is closer to the ‘actual’ Gassendi than the ‘actual’ Descartes. By invoking Descartes, Glanvill evidently lends a certain philosophical grandeur to his text, and he neatly avoids the difficulties of consorting too openly with Epicureanism, which others might associate with the abominable Hobbes. I have been arguing so far that a particular method betokens an ideology, an entire approach to personal and public knowledge, which encompasses natural philosophy, theology, criticism, and literature. Consequently, we now discover philosophical debts not primarily by hunting out explicit allusions, but by calibrating the ways in which epistemology and method are understood, used, and represented.

Thus I argue that Gassendi's peculiar methodical appropriation and domestication of Epicurus set the stage for an entirely critical and uniquely English reappropriation of Gassendi and Epicurus. Speaking of himself as the “interpreter” of Lucretius,¹³ and conscious of the “latitude” his interpretive method permits,¹⁴ Evelyn gauges his own cultural distance both from Lucretius the ancient and Gassendi the modern, while still offering an entirely exemplary vehicle—his translation of Lucretius—to make both authors available to his reader. Rand similarly encourages a series of contingent negotiations among the figures of Peiresc, Gassendi, and Evelyn. Like the “living and speaking statues” by which he describes Evelyn's children, Rand's Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility recognizes both the continuities and the disruptions involved in the transmission of culture, because it occurs like a series of translations on translations, mediated texts succeeding mediated texts. (And by reminding us of Evelyn's earlier translation of Lucretius, Rand simply amplifies this recognition.)

Gassendi is not a figure without whom the English neo-Epicurean revival is inconceivable. But it is clear that his presence on the European intellectual scene helped to organize and catalyze it: in short, his neo-Epicureanism establishes a precedent for the whole neoclassical move. Both French and English culture possessed the same classical texts, and Boyle's early and seminal manuscripts on atomism contain no explicit references to Gassendi.¹⁵ But the onset of translations of Lucretius from the mid-1650s on testifies strikingly to a new sense of the applicability of the Epicurean model to this particular crisis in English history.¹⁶ Here was a crisis that required a critical reflection on the founding premises of culture, and such criticism was in part enabled by Gassendi.

The determination to nationalize and domesticate English cultural resources, which fluctuates between desire and resistance, has also made it difficult to measure the influence of earlier sources on the Restoration. For example, the precise impact of Bacon or Descartes on Restoration culture is still inadequately understood.¹⁷ Bacon's hugely exaggerated reputation as the founder of English science derives in large part from the Restoration anxiety to preserve the native quality of its intellectual debts. Bacon frequently appears in Restoration texts, but his role—like his presence in the title page of Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society—is more polemical than methodological.¹⁸ The appeal to Bacon serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it Anglicizes the institution and practice of natural philosophy. Thus Bacon's atomistic theories were republished at midcentury in order to provide an English claim to a movement whose sources were primarily Continental.¹⁹ On the other hand, Bacon provides an intellectual authority from some antique past divorced from associations with the late civil upheaval.²⁰ A large number of scholars agree that, apart from a generic emphasis on experimentation, Bacon provided no adequate methodological tool or model for the practice of Restoration natural philosophy.²¹ It is therefore misleading to revitalize R. F. Jones's highly positivistic appreciation of Bacon first to argue some founding distinction between the “mechanical” (or “corpuscular”) philosophy and the “experimental,” and second to apply the ideal of “experiment, observation and natural histories” to Locke's philosophical practice, as if Locke had more in common with Baconian experimentalism than with atomism.²² Locke's understanding of method (and thus of history, however defined) could not operate further from Baconian inductivism: Locke believes that without hypothetical modeling (very like that described by Gassendi), particulars will never form themselves into universal propositions.²³ In his discussion of philosophical style, which has profoundly methodological implications, even Sprat evidently views Bacon as stylistically archaic: it is Hobbes, as Sprat describes him, who echoes the prescription for philosophical prose laid down in The History of the Royal Society.²⁴

The English pretense to fabricate a cultural norm without the assistance of Continental philosophy is demonstrated in a notorious debate between Sprat and Sorbière. In 1664, Sorbière, long Gassendi's disciple and an individual highly qualified to comment on the European intellectual scene, published his Relation d'un Voyage en Angleterre.²⁵ To this tendentious but nonetheless detailed and informative report, Sprat issued a shrill and frequently ad hominem reply, his Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's Voyage into England (1665), dedicated to Christopher Wren. Like his belief that the English are innately xenophobic, some of Sorbière's observations are indeed impressionistic and offensive, and they belie his general acuity. But many of the judgments to which Sprat most objects are highly suggestive, such as Sorbière's view that there is widespread resistance to Anglican hegemony.²⁶ Sorbière's attitudes provide an occasion for Sprat to demonstrate a meanness of temper, a mediocrity of mind, and a deeply suppressed fear that Sorbière's views might have foundation. If Sorbière indulges Catholic prejudice, Sprat vents a strident anti-Catholicism, and he equally stridently declaims that nothing is rotten in the state of England. The Anglican Church and the Stuart State, he writes, receive the full support of the people.²⁷

Interestingly, Sorbière records a visit to the Royal Society, in which he is first and foremost struck by the prevailing ideals of intellectual moderation and cooperation, to which he refers at least twice.²⁸ He emphasizes that such a moderate intellectual climate prohibits any uniform adherence to a single intellectual source of authority; but he nevertheless notices a distinction between the “simple Mathematiciens” and “less literateurs,” the former group inclined toward Descartes, the latter toward Gassendi.²⁹

Whatever Sorbière meant by his distinction between simple mathematicians and “literateurs,” it is possible to imagine a working methodological difference between the mathematical and experimental traditions within the Royal Society, which was later epitomized in the difference between Newton's Principia and Optics. Sorbière presents two native groups of figures to represent this difference: he describes meeting John Wallis (he also mentions Wallis's mathematical dispute with Hobbes) and also “les immortels ouvrages” of Boyle, Willis, Glissonius, and Charleton, referring especially to Boyle's air pump, on which he has performed “une infinite d'experiences.”³⁰ It is entirely likely that (even if they allowed the distinction) neither group would have admitted an allegiance either to Descartes or Gassendi. Sorbière notes precisely this resistance to factionalism, which Sprat's outrage fully confirms, but he nevertheless arguably intuits something about the different styles of philosophic practice available to the Royal Society.

Sprat, however, displays nothing but impatience with Sorbière, whose qualified judgments he caricatures as absolutes, which in turn predicate his own absolute (and absurd) declaration that “neither of these two men [Descartes and Gassendi] bear any sway amongst them [the Royal Society]: they are never nam'd there as Dictators over men's Reasons; nor is there any extraordinary reference to their judgments.”³¹

Sprat's double polemic against foreign intellectual ‘dictatorship’ and the memories of domestic strife discloses two motives for the English determination to translate and domesticate its sources, for which Bacon is the perfect instrument. Bacon swells the native strain and lends an image of primitive purity that releases the Restoration from obligations to more recent and painful events.

The appeal to an ancient past can also help avoid those charges of atheism or heterodoxy to which the age was highly attuned, and thus Bacon and similar figures could stand in for more immediately valuable but problematic sources, such as Epicurus. To recognize this strategy of camouflage is not only to recognize that the appeal to certain older figures of authority was frequently more strategic than truly methodological, but also that it reveals the extent to which the Restoration desired to appropriate the methodical power of texts, such as Epicurus's, that could be seen as subversive. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that modern interpreters have sometimes exaggerated the degree to which such texts were, or were taken to be, subversive. Hence, contrary to a comfortable historiographical myth for which Thomas F. Mayo is primarily responsible, Epicurus was not the object of attack by all outside the decadent “Restoration world of fashion,”³² though there were grounds for concern. At one level, the neo-Epicurean movement merely revitalized a familiar Renaissance problem of how an officially Christian culture could adopt or accommodate pagan authors. And at another level, Epicurus's distinctive theology did indeed raise particular difficulties: Epicurus is sometimes associated with Hobbes's putative materialism and atheism.

The calculus of responses to Epicurus in the early Restoration (and immediately before) will remain elusive unless we permit a kind of circular device, which earlier chapters have urged. That is, neo-Epicureanism was already understood as a highly sophisticated cultural organism. By 1660, it had long been the object of careful modifications in the direction of Christian orthodoxy. Epicurean theology creates the greatest difficulties, but these had been variously pruned by Erasmus, Valla, Gassendi, Charleton, and others. Thus to many during the Restoration, neo-Epicureanism denoted not only an extraordinarily powerful physical hypothesis but also a probabilist epistemology, imparting a specific cognitive principle, an hypothetical method, and an irenist and apparently latitudinarian ethic.

Baxter's hostile but still comprehensive grasp of the new “somatism” reflects the extent to which by the mid-1660s Gassendi was known even to his detractors. Moreover, English publications represent a very significant percentage of European editions of Gassendi from the 1650s on, beginning with the Institutio Astronomica, published at least as early as 1653, and frequently reprinted into the early eighteenth century.³³ Descartes was published no more frequently in England after 1640,³⁴ but the number of Gassendi's books (unimpressive even by late-seventeenth-century standards) is less significant than the overall intellectual profile of Gassendi it presents. English readers would encountered a sceptic attacking hermetic forms of knowledge, a practicing astronomer, a biographer, a historian of ancient philosophy, and a powerful theorist of method, which provides the rationale for all other intellectual practices. Indeed, in the 1660s, in an apparently unusual departure from Continental modes of publishing Gassendi's works, there were two editions of the relatively youthful Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma, issued in tandem with that fruit of Gassendi's most mature deliberations, the Institutio Logica. In consequence, access to Gassendi's recuperation of Epicurus entailed its most syntagmatic and revolutionary distillation: Gassendi's meditations on knowledge and method. Perhaps significantly, the first of these editions appeared in 1660.

If Epicurus and Epicureanism were attacked, C. T. Harrison, in a judicious essay published the same year as Mayo's book, demonstrates the range of responses manifested by seventeenth-century English writers.³⁵ Harrison describes some unambiguous attacks on Epicureanism after midcentury by such figures as Samuel Parker and Henry Stubbe. But for the most part, resistance to Epicurus is limited to isolated implications of his philosophy and (as with John Pearson) heavily qualified by a solid knowledge of Epicurean texts and respect for Gassendi's work.³⁶ Taking the picture as a whole, Harrison's painstaking account creates the impression that, even for many of its critics, the Epicurean myth had already deeply permeated some English cultural assumptions. Although Kargon credits Charleton with the acceptance of atomism after midcentury, Harrison mentions a host of reputable and influential thinkers, for whom Epicureanism represents an established if involved fact, among them John Pearson, Edward Stillingflect, John Tillotson, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, John Wilkins, Thomas Sprat, Robert Hooke, John Ray, Gilbert Burnet, Aphra Behn, Jeremy Taylor, William Temple, and Isaac Newton.³⁷

With many of these figures, the use of an etiological myth proved useful. First, Democritus could serve as a figure for a version of the prisca theologia in which the more ancient and primitive philosopher acts as proxy for Epicurus, whose more elaborate formulations invited more detailed charges of paganism.³⁸ (This is not to say that Democritus entirely escaped charges of materialism.) A second and even more neutral device was sometimes to refer to Epicurean physics as the “corpuscular philosophy,” which was also a way to refer loosely to all atomic theories of matter. Nevertheless, in Boyle's case “corpuscularianism” also denotes an entire probabilist method bolstering a calculated irenist ethic. There is no question that Boyle must have learned both from Gassendi's and Descartes's physics, but what is often interpreted as Boyle's refusal to swear allegiance to Epicureanism as a system (and hence as a proof he was no Epicurean)³⁹ constitutes part of a distinctive view of hypothetical knowledge that Epicureanism propounds.⁴⁰ M. A. Stewart thus quite properly chides Richard Westfall and R. H. Kargon for their assumptions that the young Boyle wished to escape the embarrassments of Epicureanism.⁴¹ (Ironically, the Boyle manuscripts that Westfall publishes in company with his contention constitute an extended series of deliberations on method that a neo-Epicurean would instantly recognize.)⁴²) What Sorbière noticed on his visit to the Royal Society was exactly that irenist, moderate, exemplary, and hypothetical ethic of intellectual conduct which reminds him of Gassendi, and which paradoxically encourages Sprat to conflate his Francophobia with a resistance to intellectual tyranny, a resistance that Gassendi himself actually symbolizes. If his very successful Plague of Athens (1659) is any indication, Sprat was not averse to associations with Epicureanism as such; his translation not only celebrates the famous closing passage of De Rerum Natura in its choice of subject but also adopts its resonances more than those of Thucydides, to whom Sprat also genuflects.

The third device by which Epicurus could be adapted to orthodox Christianity was to construct a Christian, rather than a pagan, etiology for the atomic hypothesis. It is well known that Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) wishes to save atomism as “unquestionably true”⁴³ and does so by ascribing its invention to Moses, and its gradual corruption and increasingly materialist emphasis to Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, then Democritus, Leucippus, and, finally, Epicurus.⁴⁴ Apparently, Cudworth had conceived his project by May 1671, when it received Samuel Parker's imprimatur,⁴⁵ in which case Cudworth is registering the substantial success of the neo-Epicurean scheme by that date, the same year in which Locke completed Drafts A and B of his Essay.

An earlier work by a younger man, Theophilus Gale, Boyle's and Temple's close contemporary, commenced publication in 1669. All four parts of The Court of the Gentiles remained incomplete until 1677, but part one, which was reissued in 1672, provides another view of the effect of the neo-Epicurean revival by the end of the 1660s. Like Cudworth (who clearly aided Gale in his project⁴⁶), Gale seeks to Christianize the substance of ancient cosmology by claiming priority for an Hebraic, if not expressly Mosaic, dispensation. Insofar as their respective aims coincide, Cudworth and Gale may at first appear to share an affiliation with a vestigial Renaissance hermeticism, detecting in ancient wisdom the traces of divine footsteps outside the circle of revealed religion;⁴⁷ but unlike Cudworth, Gale reveals how much Restoration historiographic method secretly owes to a neo-Epicureanism that it is his purpose in part to confine.

Cudworth lies on the far side of an epistemological watershed from Gale: though willing to entertain atomism as a model strictly for physics, Cudworth steadfastly refuses uniformly to apply the phenomenalism it entails.⁴⁸ He is dismayed by the notion that questions of faith may have to subject themselves to the same criteria of evidence as secular history,⁴⁹ and the final pages of the True Intellectual System elaborate a rejection of all notions of artificial justice and thus of contractual societies. Both positions depend on momentary but crucial suspensions of sceptical judgment, betokening on the one hand a belief in the accessibility of certain noumenal essences, and on the other an argument increasingly at odds with the age—namely, the view that because political obligation enjoys its own actual, ontic being, “private judgment of good and evil … is absolutely inconsistent with civil sovereignty.”⁵⁰ Appropriately, Cudworth manifests more patience with the Stoics than the Epicureans.⁵¹

By contrast, Gale rigorously grounds his massive project on precisely those inferential and analogical foundations that neo-Epicurean methodology had sought to advertise. If his intentions appear to us strange and remote, his method is recognizably less so. By examining and presenting only those (phenomenal) records available to us, Gale seeks to show that it is “very probable”⁵² that pagan mythologies embed “traces and footsteps … of Jewish, and sacred Dogmes.”⁵³ Thus he writes (citing Chillingworth):

From so great a Concurrence and Combination of Evidences, both Artificial and Inartificial, we take it for granted, that the main conclusion will appear more than conjectural, to any judicious Reader. Or suppose we arrive only to some moral certaintie or strong probabilitie, touching the veritie of the Assertion; yet this may not be neglected: for the least Apex of truth, in matters of great moment, is not a little to be valued. Besides, we may expect no greater certaintie touching any subject, than its Ground or Foundation will afford.⁵⁴

Even as early as the late 1660s, Gale's case shows us how far in some instances an anti-Epicurean (or antimaterialist) polemic could marshal expository devices that it owes in part to the neo-Epicurean contribution to method. Admittedly, Gale's references to Chillingworth and other “Modern Criticks,” such as “Ludovicus Vives, Stenchus Eugobinus, Julius and Joseph Scaliger, Serranus, Heinsius, Selden, Preston, Parker, Jackson, Hammond, Cudworth, Stillingfleet, Usher, Bochart, Vossius and Grotius,” testify that certain approaches to criticism had long been possible.⁵⁵ But Gale's appropriations of comparative and contingent method are typical of the later seventeenth century. The same point could be made of Glanvill's approach to witchcraft.⁵⁶

Richard Bentley dutifully attacked Epicurean and Hobbesian materialism in the first Boyle lectures of 1692.⁵⁷ But these demonstrate how, by the end of the century, the role of Epicurean atomism in Boyle's cosmology was widely understood. Bentley therefore selects for criticism only those distinctly pagan and unorthodox features of Epicurean thought which contradict the truths of the Christian faith. By contrast, Bentley reminds his audience that “the Mechanical or Corpuscular Philosopy, though peradventure the oldest as well as the best in the world, had lain buried for many Ages in contempt and oblivion; till now it was happily restor'd and cultivated anew by some excellent Wits of the present Age. But it principally owes its re-establishment and lustre, to Mr. Boyle.”⁵⁸ Bentley asserts that select doses of Epicureanism may serve as an antidote to more dangerous forms of atheism, because they contribute to a proper understanding of the true nature of matter, which cannot think. Such a cosmology, he writes, “being part of the Epicurean and Democritean Philosophy is providentially one of the best Antidotes against other impious Opinions: as the oil of Scorpions is said to be against the poison of their stings.”⁵⁹ Epicureanism as such was ceasing to become quite the loaded subject it once had been. Mayo interprets the apparent decline in Epicurean texts published in the first quarter of the eighteenth century as a decline of interest in Epicureanism,⁶⁰ but it is possible to take the same phenomenon to indicate a less intense anxiety about its implications. Thus, when Thomas Creech published the first complete English translation of Lucretius in 1682, he had to deflect potential attacks by elaborate and defensive annotations. But in the 1715 edition of Creech's translation, the annotator (who is not the translator) clearly no longer feels impelled so vigorously to vilify Lucretius's pagan attitudes, though he carefully signals his own orthodoxy, especially in his preface.⁶¹

In view, then, of what seems a predominantly silent absorption of neo-Epicurean method and hermeneutic (going well beyond atomistic physics), Gassendi's specific contribution to English culture has understandably remained somewhat of a mystery. On the one hand, critics have tended to rely on broad analogies between Gassendi's formulations and a defined version of English ‘empiricism.’⁶² On the other hand, finding such correspondences insufficiently compelling, and unable to forge more concrete connections between Gassendi and the English, Lynn Joy fails to admit any valuable link.⁶³ I have already disputed Joy's contention that Gassendi's historiography decisively separates him from the late seventeenth century; but she also contends that we possess no adequate textual evidence for Gassendi's influence on the Restoration.

I believe, however, that there is more evidence than most earlier scholars (except perhaps Kargon) have generally recognized.⁶⁴ First, we have presumptive evidence both in the contemporary English publications of Gassendi's works, and even more so in Charleton's imaginative, compelling, and stylish naturalization of Gassendism in a body of work initiated by The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652) and continuing with his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), Epicurus's Morals (1656), and The Immortality of the Human Soul, Demonstrated by the Light of Nature (1657). The immense range of Charleton's interests can be seen as integral to his “physio-theologicall” habilitation of Epicureanism in general and Gassendi in particular. Charleton's authorial career had begun in 1650 with two translations of Jean Baptiste van Helmont's works, representing an earlier tradition of natural philosophy.⁶⁵ Nor, I would argue, are Charleton's adaptations of Gassendi anything short of original, a claim that even Kargon has resisted.⁶⁶

Second, Thomas Stanley's influential The History of Philosophy (1655-60), in its section devoted to Epicurus, incorporates translated portions of Gassendi's De Vita et Moribus Epicuri, some passages from book ten of Diogenes Laertius, and the complete text of Gassendi's Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma.⁶⁷ Stanley, a charter member of the Royal Society, was reckoned—along with Richard Crashaw—one of the two finest translators of mid-seventeenth-century England, and he proved an exceedingly successful poet. Stanley's edition and translation of Aeschylus (1664), with which John Pearson may have assisted, gained him lasting fame,⁶⁸ and his The History of Philosophy proved to be something of a publishing wonder. First issued serially between 1655 and 1662, it was reissued complete either seven or eight times before 1743, both in England and on the Continent. Sections of Stanley's The History of Philosophy also appeared in four separate books before 1701 in the guise of The History of Chaldaic Philosophy and The Life of Socrates.⁶⁹ Jean Le Clerc included Stanley in his Opera Philosophica of 1704. The History of Philosophy appears in the listings for Evelyn's, Locke's, and Newton's libraries.⁷⁰ Cope shows how heavily Glanvill also drew upon this source.⁷¹ The section of The History of Philosophy devoted in part to Epicurus (originally in volume three) was issued in 1660, but the title page of the “Fifth Part” of Stanley's work claims that it was printed for Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring in 1659; that is, only a year after the appearance of Gassendi's Lyons edition of the Opera Omnia.

Furthermore, not only does Stanley indicate a primary debt to Gassendi's historiographical approach in his dedication to John Marsham, his uncle,⁷² but the work constantly reminds us of the special values of embedding all philosophical knowledge in biography and history. Stanley's preface applies the lessons of history to painting, because both vindicate the cognitive priority of the particular, such that “he who rests satisfied with the general Relation of Affairs, (not fixing upon some eminent Actor in that Story) loseth its greatest benefit; because what is most particular, by its nearer affinity with us, hath greatest influence upon us.”⁷³ The epigraphs to volume three, taken respectively from Bacon's Advancement of Learning and Montaigne's Essais, not only amplify the theme but also do so just as the reader approaches the Hellenistic philosophers, culminating—as in book ten of Diogenes Laertius—in the lengthy section devoted to Epicurus.

Joy rightly objects that Stanley's The History of Philosophy provides no final proof of a true English appreciation of Gassendi, because she argues that the Animadversiones and the large Syntagma represent the core of Gassendi's real contribution to mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophy. But the objection ignores several important facts: the small Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma, translated in 1659 by Stanley, was not only supplemented by other English publications of Gassendi's oeuvre but also by three reprintings (1660, 1668, and 1718), the last two offered first as a presentation of the Institutio Logica and only subsequently of the small Syntagma.⁷⁴

Moreover, Evelyn, whom Margaret C. Jacob treats as “a veritable weather vane of latitudinarian sentiment on political matters,”⁷⁵ and who was a close friend of Taylor and later of Boyle, whose executor he became,⁷⁶ assumes that the English readership of his Lucretius is fully and intimately conversant with Gassendi's work, including explicitly the Animadversiones. Again, it is arguable that Stanley assumed some similar fund of associations or knowledge on his readers' part, because the Latin Leipzig edition of his The History of Philosophy (1711) supplies marginalia to the now more pointedly renamed Philosophiae Epicuri, which not only more carefully elaborate the classical sources than Stanley's original translation but also supply almost seventy running references to both volumes of Gassendi's 1649 Animadversiones.⁷⁷

Despite the imputation of atheism, which neo-Epicureanism never entirely managed to elude, it is remarkable what kinds of texts register Gassendi's impact. On the Continent, Leibniz's Nouveau Essais pays homage to Gassendi as a significant feature of the intellectual landscape. Vico's Autobiography also testifies to the pervasiveness of Gassendism in late-seventeenth-century Europe. Vico records the moment at which he is forced, by its success, to encounter Gassendi's neo-Epicureanism. Only after reading Lucretius does Vico feel authorized to criticize the grounds of Gassendi's metaphysic, a process that anticipates his investigation and subsequent rejection of Cartesianism.⁷⁸ Closer to home and much earlier in the Restoration, Glanvill's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) and Plus Ultra (1668) both display a knowledge and approval of Gassendism, as does Boyle's Works, whose index devotes only slightly less attention to Gassendi than Descartes. For example, Boyle recommends Gassendi's Institutio Astronomica as the best single exposition of “the Copernican Hypothesis.”⁷⁹ Boyle's Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes His Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris (1662) explicitly commends Gassendi's atomism but attacks Hobbes's unfortunate materialism.⁸⁰ Here Gassendi stands as the foremost among “many other Atomists (besides other Naturalists) ancient and modern [who] expressly teach the sun-beams to consist of fiery corpuscles, trajected through the air, and capable of passing through glass,” a view Boyle first associates with “the Epicurean hypothesis.”⁸¹

Finally, as if to register and seal the orthodoxy of these earlier Restoration figures, Edward Phillips (a contemporary of Dryden and Locke) introduces Stanley and Gassendi into his Life of Milton (1694), still the most reliable early biography of his famous uncle. Gassendi appears as the last of a distinguished line of biographers stretching from Plutarch through Diogenes Laertius, Cornelius Nepos, Machiavelli, Fulke Greville, Thomas Stanley, and Isaac Walton. The “great Gassendus” occupies his position as “the worthy celebrator” of “the noble philosopher Epicurus” and Peiresc, in order to empower Phillips's own celebration of the greatest Christian poet in English.

THE ENGLISH IN PARIS: GASSENDI VERSUS DESCARTES

In the 1640s and 1650s there were some very different and much more personal contacts between Gassendi and important representatives of English society. Kargon admirably describes the émigré group in Paris circulating around Sir Charles Cavendish and Lady Margaret Cavendish, and known as the Newcastle circle. The group, which included Digby, Hobbes, and Pell, regularly communicated with the greatest representatives of French intellectual life—Marin Mersenne, Gassendi, and Descartes—as well as figures such as Pierre de Fermat, Gilles Personne de Roberval, and Sorbière. Kargon treats the Newcastle circle as a decisive vehicle for importing the new mechanical philosophy directly into England, a judgment with which Robert G. Frank concurs.⁸² But because he is chiefly interested in the history of atomism, Kargon focuses equally on the physical theories of Descartes and Gassendi, a strategy that appears to lend them equivalent authority in the midcentury development of English atomism.

For his picture of this Paris circle, Kargon draws on the well-known correspondence between Sir Charles Cavendish and Dr. John Pell, partly published in an influential article by Helen Hervey.⁸³ Hervey's purpose is to illuminate the contacts between Hobbes and Descartes. But the value of the correspondence is that it provides an almost phenomenological report from the scene and, taken as a whole, more accurately reports on English attitudes toward Gassendi and Descartes, with somewhat less focus on Hobbes. Although Hobbes is an assumed member of the group, we can witness in this correspondence, with chiefly covers the years from 1644 to 1646, the formation of a series of personal and intellectual prejudices, which finds Gassendi more persuasive than Descartes as a mentor for English cultural motives. By examining another epistolary exchange, we shall also see how these attitudes are shared both by the royalist émigrés and the Dury and Hartlib circle at home, of whom the young Boyle was an impressionable member.⁸⁴

The Paris group evidently fosters frequent and intimate contact among its members: in November 1645 William Petty thanks Pell for the ease with which his letters of introduction to Hobbes have also introduced him to Sir Charles Cavendish, Sir William Cavendish, and Mersenne.⁸⁵ Furthermore, Hobbes has happily provided Petty with access to the latest French mathematics. Consequently, in part owing to his decidedly generous intellectual disposition, Sir Charles evinces a concern to heal the obvious friction between Hobbes and Descartes. He feels indebted to Descartes for unnamed favors and finds Cartesianism “most ingenious.”⁸⁶ But Sir Charles's concern seems, from the evidence, the response to a more widespread irritation with Descartes. Pell reports that Descartes is difficult to handle on intellectual matters (“I perceive he demonstrates not willingly”).⁸⁷ Overall, we receive the impression that Descartes is exacting, prickly, and dogmatic.

By contrast with Descartes, Gassendi is a welcome and intimate member of the social and intellectual scene. It is true that Gassendi and Hobbes were allied in rebutting Descartes's Meditations; but again, the sense of the preference for Gassendi seems to stem from his general ethical and intellectual modus operandi. Thus, in September 1644, Pell doubts that Hobbes and Gassendi can reconcile with Descartes.⁸⁸ Despite his “esteem” for Descartes's “last newe booke of philosophie,” Sir Charles Cavendish admits that “I am of your opinion that Gassendus and De Cartes are of different dispositions,” adding that “Mr. Hobbes joins with Gassendes in his dislike of De Cartes his writings.”⁸⁹ He volunteers in the same passage that Hobbes “is joined in a greate friendship with Gassendes.”⁹⁰ In the letters written between August 1644 and October 1646, Gassendi circulates almost as frequently and certainly more fluently than either Hobbes or Descartes, to such an extent that, after a noticeable absence, he reappears in a telling aside. Sir Charles Cavendish has been tempted by Athanasius Kircher's “book … of light and shadow,” but because “Monsieur Gassendes doth not much commend it … I have no encouragement to buy or to read it.”⁹¹ Gassendi's authority is perhaps subtle, but it is real.

It is possible to cull from these exchanges solely the whims of personal prejudice, an early but familiar version of academic politics. But the grouping of alliances seems as consistently intellectual as social: Pell carefully selects the word “genius” to describe the difference between Gassendi's (thus Hobbes's) and Descartes's ethic.⁹² Sir Charles Cavendish knows that the degree of difficulty between Hobbes and Descartes is in direct proportion to their philosophical differences. Like Gassendi's, Hobbes's physical theories are much more Democritean than Descartes's—one cause for the failure of their meeting.⁹³

The intellectual content of such enmities and alliances is vividly illustrated by two features of the correspondence. The first concerns the theme of Descartes's intellectual envy, which Pell introduces in a letter dated August 1644, and which informs my epigraph from Swift. Descartes has attacked “Monsieur Hardy” for buying an expensive “Arabicke manuscript of Apollonius.”⁹⁴ Searching to explain this behavior, Hardy interprets it “as a signe of envy in Des Cartes, as being unwilling that we should esteeme the ancients, or admire any man but himself for the doctrine of lignes courbes.”⁹⁵ Not only does Descartes later refuse fully to cooperate in conversation with Pell by offering mathematical demonstrations, but his attitude informs a singular approach to the ancients, of whom “he magnifies none but Archimedes,” though he “hath a high opinion of Euclid and Apollonius for writing so largely y^t which he conceives may be put into so little roome.”⁹⁶ In sum, Descartes refuses to credit the ancients with their own historical life apart from his most immediate intellectual desires, because he resents the philosophical space that historical baggage occupies. History mediates and frustrates the search for absolute philosophical categories. Predictably, “he suspects Diophantus might be excellent in the books w^ch are lost,” because that permanently muted knowledge suits his own intellectual supremacy.⁹⁷ Of course, the moderns fare no better: Pell would be embarrassed to repeat what Descartes has said about Vieta, Fermat, Roberval, and Golius, and he has been too wise even to mention Hobbes.⁹⁸ The same month (March 1646), Sir Charles Cavendish (ultimately in vain) encourages Pell to publish his own works, despite Descartes's persuasions to the contrary.⁹⁹

The second feature of the correspondence that lends an intellectual weight to its social preferences is the writers' fascination with the latest philosophical publications. Many of Sir Charles Cavendish's letters to Pell begin with either requests or thanks for some new tract or book. Cavendish's letters of 1644 engage, for example, with the publication and reception of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy. Although Cavendish discovers he likes the work, Pell reports that Gassendi remains unconvinced (August 1644), whereas Cavendish predicts that Hobbes will not like it either, a suspicion that proves correct (October 1644). The letter of October 1644 reveals that Hobbes, who had already read and dismissed the manuscript of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, has received support for his intellectual judgment from a friend who also has seen it. It is possible that this friend is Gassendi, who immediately provides the next topic: Hobbes has seen an impressive manuscript of Gassendi's, and he judges it to be “as big as Aristotle's philosophie, but much truer and excellent Latin,” which Kargon concludes to be a draft of the Animadversiones. Cavendish requests Gassendi's Disquisitio Metaphysica, his rebuttals of Descartes, about which he has been inquiring for a month. In December, Cavendish gratefully records its arrival.

Now writing in 1648, Sir Charles Cavendish again indulges his interest in Gassendi. Cavendish believes that De Vita et Moribus Epicuri (1647) and the Animadversiones compose an integral project, because he reports that “Gassendus … proceeds with his Epicurean phylosophie, the halfe of which; I doubte is not yet printed” (August 1648). In early 1649, Descartes's The Passions of the Soul has appeared, but Cavendish is anxious by March to obtain a copy of Gassendi's Animadversiones (“Mr: Gassendes his Epicurean philosophie”). In May Pell announces its long-awaited publication, describing its cost and size. He has, he says, met Sorbière, who supervised the publication of Gassendi's Disquisitio Metaphysica and translated Hobbes's De Cive into French. Sorbière also mentions that the Animadversiones have sold so well that a second printing is contemplated. A year later (June 1650), Cavendish has finally received his own copy of the Animadversiones. Significantly, especially in light of their mathematical biases, Cavendish and Pell think of Gassendi's work not even primarily as a treatise on physics, but as the exposition of an organic and refined philosophical scheme. It is therefore no accident that Cavendish retails Hobbes's remark that the Animadversiones will effectively displace Aristotle in scope, penetration, and style.

HARTLIB, GASSENDI, THE AIR PUMP, AND BOYLE

The Newcastle circle also anticipates the neo-Epicurean strain in Restoration culture because it was indirectly linked with a significant group of individuals in England, which did not share its party political affiliations. Through Petty, both Hartlib and Boyle seem to have learned of Gassendi's Animadversiones at a point in Boyle's career that has remained somewhat of a mystery. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have argued that Boyle's belief in the vacuum (defended by experiments with his air pump) served an ideological debate with Hobbes, on the grounds that his plenism was the physical equivalent to his political absolutism. But these were the actions of a mature Boyle, and Shapin and Schaffer's book does not connect this ethical use of a physical hypothesis with Epicureanism as a cultural organism, which specifically encourages a cohesive link between method, the void, and an ethical voluntarism. The void, in short, represents the possibility of movement and negotiation among the constituents of matter or society, and thus it encourages the notion that, on the one hand, the discrete particles in this economy must retain their integrity and, on the other, that we must discover a literary technology that promotes the dual possibility of integrity and assent. I have also argued that the integrity of the atomic particle encourages a view of the example that resists reduction and that therefore encourages the movements of assent or dissent. Like Evelyn, Boyle seems to seek an idea of the exemplary suited to new ethical and cognitive requirements, and to intuit very early on that the rhetoric of the dialogue and the epistle seems to offer the desired effect.

By attending to the rather fragmentary correspondence between Hartlib and Boyle, I want first to suggest that, before he could explore Gassendi in full, the young Boyle already associates a certain literate method with a distinct ethic, that he knew of the Animadversiones before they were published, and that his early interest in atomism must therefore have occurred in an atmosphere which treats that physical hypothesis as part of an entire methodological and ethical program.

In a letter to Hartlib dated 8 May 1647, Boyle indicates that “Gassendus [is] a great favourite of mine.”¹⁰⁰ But at this point relatively little of Gassendi's important work had been published. Boyle's full appreciation of Gassendi almost certainly had to wait a year or more, because the Animadversiones was published in 1649. It is Hartlib's contact with Petty in particular that first connects Boyle to the Newcastle circle. Hartlib introduces Petty to Boyle in a letter dated 16 November 1647: Petty, it transpires, is “a perfect Frenchman, and a good linguist in other vulgar languages besides Latin and Greek, a most rare and exact anatomist, and excelling in all mathematical and mechanical learning, of a sweet natural disposition and moral comportment.”¹⁰¹

In May 1648, in a pivotal letter Hartlib writes again to the youthful Boyle (he is only twenty-one). Here Hartlib acts as purveyor of intellectual goods: his main purpose is to enclose an extract of a letter from Sir Charles Cavendish to Petty, which Hartlib has received through Benjamin Worsley (the surveyor general under whom Petty was to work in Ireland after 1652). Clearly, Hartlib's general motive for copying the extract is his detailed interest in intellectual affairs on the Continent. But the more specific motive is captured by the letter's suggestive conjunction between Gassendi and the air pump, which was to play such an iconic role in Boyle's career. Gassendi “hath now” his “Philosophy of Epicurus” in “the press at Lyons”; the existence of the Animadversiones (to which Cavendish refers) thus seems already to have been introduced to English intellectual circles by mid-1648.

Gassendi's text seems to fit with Hartlib's and Boyle's correspondence in several ways. Because Gassendi seeks, like Epicurus, to fuse all intellectual issues with ethical ones, the reference to his Animadversiones could mirror Hartlib's evident concern to treat Petty's intellectual credentials and certain social and moral values as one. Petty meets Hartlib's criteria for reforming and harmonizing philosophical enquiry and political conduct, a project that deeply influenced Boyle, even before he could articulate it by reference to the embryonic neo-Epicurean revival.

Before Boyle could have known of Gassendi's Animadversiones, Boyle's series of letters to Hartlib and Dury of 1647 discuss Dury's and Hartlib's utopian projects, themselves of course responses to the unsettled times. But, more interestingly, Boyle's letters seem to anticipate the neo-Epicurean texts we have examined, because they are highly self-conscious dramatizations of a mode of intellectual and ethical behavior that display a moderate and irenist ethic. The point here is that Boyle seems to seek a rhetoric that in its method will itself enact the contingent epistemology that—as a response to the civil war—would make forms of social negotiation necessary and desirable. Indeed, the first letter (19 March 1647), which mentions two of Hartlib's utopian tracts, as well as suggestions for a universal character, begins with an invocation to the epistolary muse. “I need a great deal of rhetoric to express to you, how great a satisfaction I received in the favor of your letter,” Boyle writes, “both for the sake of the theme, and more for that of the author.”¹⁰² Boyle believes that rhetoric is the contingent instrument for lending ideas phenomenal weight within the social and intellectual arena. In the final letter in the series, he determines not to neglect “improving my rhetoric to the uttermost,” in order to assist Dury's logical schemes (themselves integral to the social program) “by exemplifying his rules, to clothe with flesh and skin his excellent skeleton of the Art of Reasoning.”¹⁰³ Here Boyle clearly speaks in terms of incarnating knowledge, of rendering it somatic in order to propagate it.

Other very closely related metaphors for incarnating and textualizing knowledge in order to render it socially negotiable also appear in these letters from Boyle. The first occurs in the title of Hartlib's now lost Imago Societatis. Like Hartlib's description of Macaria (1641), this tract seeks to propose a society that exemplifies a Christian reformation of education and politics. The subtitle to Hartlib's Macaria conceives of its polity as “an example to other nations,” which mirrors the theology of 1 Pet. 1:9: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” However, the imaging or “showing forth” of the new nation exploits the device of the dialogue (“between a scholar and a traveller”), which enjoys more classical than biblical antecedents and, like rhetoric in general, presumes the merely contingent negotiations of knowledge. That is, “showing forth” can be seen as an incarnation of knowledge, which is made possible by the enactments of dialogue. And, curiously, as Boyle reports his response to having read “your Imago Societatis with a great deal of delight,” he himself has “lately traced a little dialogue in my thoughts.”¹⁰⁴ A few lines later, he expresses his hope for Mr. Hall's “Divine Emblems,” which itself distills Boyle's interest in the ideal exemplary image, whose power he describes as “probable.”¹⁰⁵

The letter of May 1647 in which Boyle mentions his special regard for Gassendi is devoted to a discussion of the “Invisible College,” and it is explicitly in this relation that Gassendi appears.¹⁰⁶ The letter is also deeply concerned with the question of exemplarity. Having introduced the topic of Hartlib's invisible college, Boyle pauses to thank Hartlib for his letters and reaches for a doubly numismatic and plastic metaphor: “And truly, Sir, for my particular, had you been to coin and shape news, not so much to inform, as to delight me, you should scarce have made choice of any, that were more welcome.”¹⁰⁷ Although ostensibly serving private communication, the epistolary manner, Boyle tells us, achieves a kind of public value and a capacity for circulation and exchange, like a coin or statue; it then gathers the power to instruct and delight. Like the epistolary mode, the invisible college will become a discrete concrete example to the nation. And, like his role in the Newcastle circle, it is possible that Gassendi could already represent to Boyle the advancement of knowledge in association with an ideal of essentially private, cooperative, and even redemptive social behavior, which as we have seen, is dear both to Sir Charles Cavendish and Hartlib.¹⁰⁸

The degree to which Gassendi's eno-Epicureanism could specifically provide a vocabulary for that ideology was a mere potential in 1647: Boyle's letter of May was written three months before Gassendi's De Vita et Moribus Epicuri received royal approval,¹⁰⁹ and two years before the Animadversiones appeared. But by 1648, things have changed. Petty arrives on the scene, importing his knowledge of Continental affairs, and Hartlib, in two letters to Boyle, can now convey more details of Gassendi's neo-Epicurean project.

The letter that Hartlib copies for Boyle in May 1648, and that I introduced above, fortuitously realizes some of the terms of Gassendi's neo-Epicureanism, now a matter of public record. For just as Petty represents to Hartlib an ideal combination of philosopher and moral agent, so Gassendi embodies a strikingly similar complex of values, and thus he serves to link Sir Charles Cavendish and Petty, the society they create, and Hartlib's friendship with Boyle. Cavendish refers to Gassendi as “your worthy friend and mine,”¹¹⁰ thereby uniting an ideal of intellectual inquiry with the exemplum of friendship, a virtue appropriately textualized in the intimacies of the private letter. For all his personal feelings for Descartes, Cavendish never accords him the particular value that Gassendi not only assumes here but also had himself described in his De Vita et Moribus Epicuri.

We also saw that Cavendish—in the same letter that Hartlib copies for Boyle—discusses Gassendi's Animadversiones and enumerates the details of the air pump. The conjunction is significant, because the air pump represents “an experiment how to show … that there is or may be a vacuum.”¹¹¹ In contrast to Cartesian or Hobbesian plenism, the existence of a vacuum establishes one of the premises of neo-Epicurean physics, of which the Animadversiones is a revolutionary vehicle. And by virtue of the characteristically isonomic Epicurean device, the vacuum (like the atomic swerve that Gassendi revised out of the physics) represents not only the physical space in and through which atoms can move but also its ethical corollary, the desideratum of social and intellectual accommodation and choice. If Shapin and Schaffer are correct, it is precisely this corollary that Boyle was later to implement, with devastating effect, against Hobbes's physics.

If Hartlib's letters of 1647 and 1648 represent any development in Boyle's early and express enthusiasm for Gassendi, then we might ask how Gassendi's neo-Epicureanism was to achieve through Boyle a revolutionary effect on English culture—that is, how closely can we link Boyle's enormously influential adoption of corpuscularian physics to a knowledge of Gassendi at midcentury? Richard Westfall believes that Boyle's earliest extant manuscripts concerning “Ye Atomicall Philosophy” were written by 1653. Westfall argues that they postdate 1649, when, he tells us, Gassendi published his Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma. By implying that the Epicurean Syntagma alone was published in 1649, Westfall conveniently supports his assumption that Boyle was embarrassed by his own putatively illicit interest in Epicureanism, because the small Syntagma does not present Gassendi's revisions of Epicureanism. However, M. A. Stewart's challenge to Westfall is supported by the fact that the Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma originally appeared in 1649 as a condensed appendix to volume two of the much more comprehensive Animadversiones, and Boyle's access to the Epicurean Syntagma could only occur by his knowing of the entire Animadversiones. The implications for our view of the early Boyle are at least twofold. First, if—as is highly probable, and in practice Westfall and Kargon must assume—Boyle had read the Animadversiones in 1649, Boyle's understanding of Gassendi would then extend well beyond the biography and redaction of Epicurus. Second, because Gassendi's adaptation and modification of Epicureanism sought to transpose pagan requirements into Christian ones; because both the ancient and the modern forms of Epicureanism provide perfect equivalents to Boyle's early union of method, physics, and ethics; and because the figure of Gassendi evidently circulated as easily in the Hartlib as the Newcastle circle, there seems little reason to see in Boyle an urgency to reject associations with Epicureanism. Thus, writing about Boyle's physics to Spinoza in 1663, Henry Oldenburg is wonderfully unembarrassed by the current status of “Epicurean” physics. He reports that Boyle wishes to adopt it in order to displace “the chemists and the schoolmen” and then to reform it on experimental grounds, themselves reflecting—as Boyle himself at one point writes—neo-Epicurean method: “Our Boyle is one of those who are distrustful enough of their reasoning to wish that phenomena should agree with it.”¹¹²

JOHN EVELYN: THE NEO-EPICUREAN NATURALIZED

John Evelyn's career epitomizes the matrix of cultural and philosophical attitudes that neo-Epicureanism came to symbolize in the Restoration. Evelyn served as an important vehicle for translating French cultural attitudes into English ones during the Interregnum; he was closely in touch with the developing interest in natural philosophy, both in the royalist and Cromwellian camps; and he developed a vocabulary of cultural knowledge, which owes something to the Epicurean Suggrammata and to Gassendi's ideal of biographical and historical modes of reading. The probable occasion of Evelyn's contact with Gassendism, if not Gassendi—his trip to Europe in the 1640s—itself manifests the distinctive combination of royalist, Anglican, and irenist commitments, which was to form Evelyn's entire reputation. E. S. de Beer records that Evelyn left England in 1643, unwilling to swear allegiance to Parliament. In 1646 he established contact with the group of émigrés in Paris, which worshipped at the chapel of Sir Richard Browne, the king's emissary to the French court. Browne had instituted his chapel—significantly—as a visible reminder of his devotion to a uniquely Anglican polity, which increasingly dissociated itself from the courtly and predominantly Catholic circle gathered around Queen Henrietta Maria.¹¹³ Evelyn married Browne's daughter, Mary, who was to design the frontispiece to the Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura; Interpreted and Made English Verse and whose virtues Rand celebrates in his translation of Gassendi's life of Peiresc. Additionally, in 1656, Browne cemented a public and literary relationship with his son-in-law by dedicating a poem to Evelyn's Lucretius.

Evelyn's return to England in 1652 marks the point at which Evelyn began systematically to cultivate himself as a palpable example of that confluence of private and public virtue for which he became famous, and which Taylor distills in a reference to Tusculanum.¹¹⁴ Circero's Tusculanian Disputations enacts a search for, and the methods appropriate to, a probabilist epistemology by dramatizing a series of dialogues conducted in Cicero's seaside villa at Tusculanum, itself symbolizing a studied perspective on the turbulence of public life in Rome.¹¹⁵ Evelyn's posture of moderation and virtue permitted him to reconcile a fervent Anglican and royalist temperament with an astonishingly wide range of acquaintance.¹¹⁶ Evelyn articulated his cultural and personal projects by several means. First, especially in the form of letters, he developed a marked and novel ideal of intimate friendship.¹¹⁷ Second, with an almost mystical enthusiasm, he appropriated and elaborated the image of hortulan retirement in a number of concrete forms: his renowned garden at Sayes Court (Evelyn's aforementioned Tusculanum and, in Taylor's words, his “Terrestrial Paradise”); his extensive writings about horticulture; and his equally extensive collection of books on the subject. Third, Evelyn patiently explored and articulated the nature of the exemplary phenomenal image, a fascination that unites his concern over the minutiae of printing with his antiquarian and numismatic interests.

The correspondence of Taylor and Evelyn breathes the atmosphere of a cultivated, intense, and intimate friendship of the kind Taylor describes in his Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (1657).¹¹⁸ Not unlike Boyle, Taylor and Evelyn stretch the capacities of their epistolary styles to manufacture an original and urgent language of friendship. A deeply moving exchange between them occurs at the loss of Evelyn's young son in February 1657/58; but we also catch something of the artificiality of the pose, an emblem of the discourse under construction, as it were, in a letter from Taylor to Evelyn dated May 1657, written during the composition of Taylor's Discourse: “I only can love you, and honour you, and pray for you; and in all this I can not say but that I am behind hand with you, for I have found so great effluxes of all your worthinesses and charities, that I am a debtor for your prayers, for the comfort of your letters, for the charity of your hand, and the affections of your heart.”¹¹⁹ The spatial trope, by placing the author temporarily behind, implicitly at a competitive disadvantage to his addressee, predicates the quality of the prose, which seeks by a flurry of activity, accumulating clauses, to close the distance. What is artificial, however, is no less felt. On completing his Discourse (June 1657), Taylor proclaims Evelyn the concrete realization of the ideas it describes. “Sir, your kind letter hath so abundantly rewarded and crowned my innocent endeavors in my description of Friendship,” Taylor begins,

that I perceive there is a friendship beyond what I have fancied, and a real, material worthiness beyond the heights of the most perfect ideas: and I know now where to make my book perfect, and by an appendix to outdo the first essay: for when anything shall be observed to be wanting in my character, I can tell them where to see the substance, much more beauteous than the picture, and by sending the readers of my book to be spectators of your life and worthiness, they shall see what I would fain have taught them, by what you really are.¹²⁰

In Taylor's allegory, true perfection resides not in the implicitly Neoplatonic perfection of ideas, abstracted (“beyond the heights”) from the mundane, or so much in the particular, as in the “material,” substantial, or “real.” And Evelyn consciously strove to articulate this incarnated perfection in his Kentish garden, and, by extension, in his numerous schemes for improving the forestry, ecology, horticulture, and habitable spaces of England.¹²¹ Evelyn strives comprehensively to embody and enact the conditions for a new variety of citizen, for which private friendship is a prolegomenon. Sayes Court, as an image of that desired culture, attracted precisely such spectators of Evelyn's art as Taylor imagines, in the form of Cromwellian and Stuart grandees.¹²² Executing Taylor's prescriptions for friendship in his Discourse, Evelyn subtly revises his polity away from the Ciceronian and Plutarchan models of social intercourse to embrace female company. Addressing the question of “how friendships are to be conducted,”¹²³ the Discourse, an epistle addressed to Mrs. Katherine Philips, inveighs against “the morosity of those cynics, who would not admit your sex into the communities of a noble friendship.”¹²⁴ Like the Epicurean community, which in this respect was unique within classical culture, both Evelyn and Mrs. Philips conscript their spouses into a mythology of friendship, which seeks at once to reform the conventional terms of marriage and to embrace other individuals. They share Taylor, the “Palaemon” to Mrs. Philips's “Orinda.”

Mary Evelyn is a silent partner in this discussion of friendship, but her engagement within the hortulan virtues of Sayes Court has a striking parallel in a different textual space of her own making, namely the frontispiece to John Evelyn's Essay upon Lucretius (p. 168). (Rand was later to refer to John and Mary Evelyn as “true yoak-fellowes.”¹²⁵) It should first be noted that Mary Evelyn inherited the main features of her design from Michel de Marolles's translation of Lucretius (1650), the first full translation into French. Marolles's frontispiece in turn owes something to Jan Jansson's Amsterdam edition of 1620, which Cosmo Alexander Gordon believes to be “the earliest printed illustration” of De Rerum Natura.¹²⁶ Mary Evelyn's appropriation of Marolles's frontispiece should be read in at least two directions: it comments on the general project, shared by Marolles and John Evelyn, of translating Lucretius into vernacular languages; it also comments on the specifically English desire to import and so domesticate French cultural artifacts at this historical juncture. The one commentary occurs in Marolles's original, in which the conventional iconology of the four elements is subtly altered; the other occurs in Mary Evelyn's equally delicate adjustments to that original. The four main figures represent earth, water, fire, and air.¹²⁷ But by a series of intricate iconological adjustments, the design subtly revises the political connotations of its emblems by Christianizing, feminizing, and particularizing their cultural associations. The most obvious and important fact is that it is Evelyn's wife who supervises the reader's entrance upon her husband's translation, a fact engraved on the lip of Neptune's urn. Mary's name thus publicly cooperates in a cameo of cultural reinterpretation with her husband (“J.E.”) and Wenceslaus Hollar, the period's most distinguished engraver and illustrator. Second, the design balances the presence of three male figures (Neptune, Vulcan, and John Evelyn) with three female figures by adding the presiding allegorical figure of begnignita, or sostanza: Cesare Ripa's Iconologia allegorizes both virtues with a woman whose breasts, like Ceres' fruit, represent abundance. At the same time, Mary Evelyn has also differentiated the sexes by substituting Vulcan for the more habitual female representation of fire. The Vulcanic hammer can now economically allude to Lucretius's mechanistic universe.

The frame accordingly achieves a temporary balance between its representations of gender; however, on closer examination, the rhetorical weight shifts from the masculine left to the feminine right. The conventional grammar of reading pictures favors the move, but, as if to assist it, the rather bland allegorical figures of Neptune and Vulcan stolidly clutching trident and hammer, respectively, lose something by comparison to the more fertile, lavish, and polyvalent female figures. (The action is articulated by the sweeping gesture of the gown on the top of the frontispiece, which directs the eye in a circular movement toward the right.) The seated Ceres, for example, concentrates several associated iconological possibilities. Her coronet is borrowed from Cybele, founder of civilizations, while Ceres herself inherits from medieval iconology the image of the nourshing church, apparently the central edifice on the coronet. Ceres shares with Minerva the serpent, representing, in this connection, prudence and logic. Hence Ceres not only plays a part in the generic allegory of the four elements by symbolizing earthly plenitude but also infuses a Christian tonality into the Lucretian fascination with the founding elements of human civilization, as well as the cosmos.

The act of feminizing and Christianizing is, however, by no means unambiguous. Just as the Christianized possibilities of the frontispiece exploit a pagan mythology, such that the pagan image only hazily predicates a submerged Christian icon, so the cultural resonance of translating Lucretius in the mid-seventeenth century is at least double-edged. By presenting the lion peeping from beneath Ceres/Cybele's gown, it is almost as if the frontispiece dramatizes this peculiarly destabilized hermeneutic: the classical iconology surrounding Cybele usually requires two lions, the transfigured forms of Atalanta and Hippomenes,¹²⁸ but the single lion here, though admitting that pagan tradition, invokes the Christian iconology by which a lion could represent either Christ or Satan. The lion rises as a warning to the Christian about to engage Lucretius's pagan masterpiece.

The figures in the frontispiece do not behave in a uniformly allegorical manner. The tension within the frame questions the nature and role of allegorical interpretation itself and, in so doing, revises the epistemological and political terms under which representation operates. John Evelyn's portrait directly faces a figure ambiguously representing air, and only by default: apart from occupying the conventional space given to the fourth element, she has been denuded of Juno's emblems—the peacock, or an anvil on each foot signifying her punishment for disobeying Jupiter.¹²⁹ The political premises of the frontispiece preclude such images of female subservience. The absence of such iconological cues, as well as this most realistic and Christianized allegorical figure of all, invites the consideration that the image setting itself against Junoesque vanity and submission may stand for Mary Evelyn herself. The postulate encourages the historical and concrete to emerge from and even escape general and abstract knowledge. It inscribes a moment of translation. The figure of Mary Evelyn can be felt to resist the weight of inherited, reflex modes of interpretation constituted by male, classical, and pagan influences, yet she also approaches and greets her husband.

Where the top and right frames of the frontispieces succor the feminine, its bottom frame curiously mingles male and female. Technically, the snake is Ceres' possession; the urn, Neptune's. But here their juxtaposition confuses such identities. First, Mary Evelyn's name marks the gushing urn: the rim identifies her genius within the frame, and the action of the water mirrors the fruit spilling onto Ceres' gown and the milk of abundance raining down from the officiating figure of sustenance. The snake and the urn, moreover, move away from their proper points of origin, causing them to mingle, so the womblike urn is about to swallow the snake. The water gushing from the urn's mouth further mixes male and female polarities, because it seems to drench both Ceres' and Neptune's feet. The feminized terms of the emblem absorb rather than exclude the masculine.

Hence by juggling the tropes of an emblem that, like De Rerum Natura itself, raises the most elemental questions about civilization and the cosmos, Mary Evelyn's frontispiece effectually contributes to the wider debate to which neo-Epicurenism was also tributary. In short, the frontispiece constitutes its own discursive space, which, by alluding to and revising the presumptions of iconological reading, establishes its own delicate critique of interpretive authority and behavior. The polity of the Epicurean garden, made real in Sayes Court and in John Evelyn's conduct of friendship, can foster Mary Evelyn's subtle but ambitious claims for the role of women and for cooperation between the sexes within her own design for a new social order.¹³⁰

The ambiguous emblem of the lion curiously focuses something of Evelyn's own ambivalence about his Essay on Lucretius. He expresses his hesitation about his project in terms of his frustrations with a sloppily printed edition—something that later irritated him about the printing of his Numismata.¹³¹ But in response to Taylor's much more uncomplicated admiration for the translation, Evelyn also rather vaguely fears that he might indeed have loosed a lion on an unsuspecting public. A penciled gloss appended to a letter from Taylor in 1656 reads: “I would be none of y^e Ingeniosi malo publico.”¹³² Years later, in his guardedness about popular misconceptions of Epicureanism, Evelyn tells William Wotton that his recently dead friend Boyle “was a Corpuscularian without Epicurus.”¹³³

Curiously, however, it is in the context of the elaborately constructed letters of friendship between Evelyn and Taylor that we detect not only the fascination Lucretius could exercise for Taylor's immaculate orthodoxy but also the terms in which Lucretius's pagan theology was debated and revised. Like John Wilkins, Taylor is deeply impressed by Evelyn's translation, and he urges Evelyn more than once to finish the final four books of De Rerum Natura. Taylor's initial enthusiasm is somewhat tempered by his advice that Evelyn should strategically distance himself from Lucretius's theological views,¹³⁴ subsequently, the friends discuss the immortality of the soul,¹³⁵ only some time after Evelyn has written that “my animadversiones … will I hope provide against all … ill consequences, and totally acquit me either of glory or impiety.”¹³⁶ None of these gestures even hints at rejecting neo-Epicureanism tout court.

Evelyn might attempt to preserve Boyle from Epicurean heterodoxy. But if we step back from the minutiae of Evelyn's response to De Rerum Natura, and particularly if we register his obiter dicta, we see how profoundly he associates neo-Epicureanism with the new philosophy, especially the community it signifies. Returning to his diary entry for 12 May 1656, which records the initial publication of the Essay on Lucretius, Evelyn retrospectively comments that “little of the Epicurean Philosophy was known then amongst us.” The temporal logic here is critical. For if Evelyn's correspondence—treated as a coherent allegory of English culture between 1647 and 1704—describes a triumph of knowledge, it occurs in the form not of atheism or materialism, but of “the new philosophy,” which, he declares in 1703, “has since obtained.”¹³⁷ At this point, Wotton is researching the life of Boyle, a project to which Evelyn attaches absolute significance; it is uniquely biography which can preserve that fragile relation between natural philosophy and culture, for which neo-Epicureanism is a perfect figure. For Evelyn, Gassendi's life of Peiresc has achieved the task definitively by transmitting the memory of “that illustrious and incomparable virtuoso.”¹³⁸ Whereas Peiresc exemplifies a mode of knowledge for which Gassendi has invented the perfect literary vehicle, Wotton's biography can now make of Boyle an ideal example for future generations. By the end of Evelyn's life, Boyle's name evokes in him such powerful resonances for a peculiar set of philosophical and cultural values that Evelyn finally indulges in a fanciful and elaborate myth that will permanently link the Boyles with the Evelyn family name.¹³⁹

The impulse behind Evelyn's mythologizing of Boyle derives from his earliest dealings with him. Like his visit to the Oxford philosophical group in July 1654, prompted by “my excellent & deare Friend Dr. Wilkins,”¹⁴⁰ Evelyn's relationship with Boyle extends the ideals of intimate friendship to more public models of social exchange. Evelyn lends his own diary and correspondence the weight of a developing but coherent narrative in a series of retrospective comments, which by hindsight realigns the allegory of events as they were originally recorded. The result is a vision of the gradual expansion of his private ideals into the cultural and political landscape. Evelyn editorializes his visit to Oxford in 1654 by later inserting the comment that Wilkins is “now Bishop of Chester,” an institutional turn taken by other members of the Oxford group, and that Evelyn describes in a letter of 1703.¹⁴¹ Evelyn himself accentuates the activity of a historical narrative in which an ever-widening circle of friends seems to have begun—like Evelyn tending his garden—at some intellectual and geographical fixed point. The general concern with the transmission and propagation of cultural knowledge also discovers a convenient metaphor in the figure of the expansion of knowledge by an ever-widening series of concentric circles.

Of this activity, Boyle is a persistent feature. In 1659 Evelyn writes to Boyle about “our common and good friend Mr. Hartlib”¹⁴² and alludes to a work “concerning the ornaments of gardens, which I have requested him to communicate to you.”¹⁴³ Evelyn's assumption of an imago societatis later finds unpremeditated reinforcement in 1665, when Evelyn rejoices in the prospect of Wilkins, Petty, and Hooke living together at “my Lord Geo. Barclay's at Durdans near my brother” and discussing all kinds of schemes, which excite in Evelyn the reflection that “I know not of such another happy conversation of Virtuosi in England.”¹⁴⁴ Evelyn's enthusiasm is to be expected not only on account of his hortulan and familial imaginatio but also because such a conversational and harmonious society is the subject of an elaborate proposal he presents to Boyle in 1659, less than a month after he hopes Hartlib will have conveyed Evelyn's work on gardens. The letter lays bare the motives that combine the interests of friendship, hortulan virtue, and social exemplification united under a single rubric—the determination to resist cultural and political instability (“that fond morigeration to the mistaken customs of the age”).¹⁴⁵ Prevented by his family (“an aggregate person”) from offering himself as the founder of his proposed community, Evelyn finds in Boyle the embodiment and seminal figure of his design.¹⁴⁶ A plot of “thirty or forty acres of land, in some healthy place, not above twenty-five miles from London”¹⁴⁷ will provide space for the cultivation of true religion and “experimental knowledge,”¹⁴⁸ while a kind of sabbatical system will infuse into the larger body politic those virtues cultivated in Tusculan retirement. Evelyn's precise spatial descriptions emphasize how this society may fill the gap or interruption in culture that he characterizes as “this sad Catalysis.” Evelyn describes his general aim:

In order to this, I propound, that because we are not to hope for a mathematical college, much less, a Solomon's house, hardly a friend in this sad Catalysis, and inter hos armorum strepitus, a period so uncharitable and perverse; why might not some gentlemen, whose geniuses are greatly suitable, and who desire nothing more than to give a good example, preserve science, and cultivate themselves, join together in society, and resolve upon some orders and oeconomy, to be mutually observed, such as shall best become the end of their union, if, I cannot say, without a kind of singularity, because the thing is new: yet such, at least, as shall be free from pedantry, and all affectation?¹⁴⁹

The spatializing of knowledge that actuates a coherent cultural image implies specular activity at two levels. Each participant, cultivating an individual garden within the boundaries of the smaller world, sees in each cohabitant a reflection of the ideals that the community desires. Similarly, the community serves as a complete example to official culture, signaled by the relative proximity of London—a Rome to Horace's Sabine farm. Knowledge of the example is enacted in terms primarily of circulation—the circulation of virtuous examples within the community's confines, as well as the recycling of continuously refurbished images to and from the wider society. It should not surprise us, then, that Evelyn's antiquarianism should lead him to a fascination with numismatics—material images confronting us from the past—or that Gassendi's biography of Peiresc should represent both sets of values to Evelyn.

A number of letters from the 1680s and 1690s develop Evelyn's elaborate conception of the use and function of medals as cultural artifacts. Medals assume a peculiar value, which they share with pictures, title pages, and illustrations, but to which they literally lend unusual weight and compression. Evelyn's discussion of these images from the past occurs within a heightened consciousness of their historical and epistemological status. Such images “transmit anything valuable to posterity”¹⁵⁰ only by a lucky chance, a happy union of fragmentary evidences. But Evelyn wants to regularize conditions of misfortune, malice, and accident by prescribing methods for collecting and maintaining books, pictures, and medals. His most extended deliberations on the topic occur in a letter to Samuel Pepys, dated 12 August 1689, in which he repeatedly indicts the “sad dispersions” of great repositories of culture—such as King Charles I's, Prince Henry's, and the Earl of Clarendon's collections—in the recent past and especially during “the late fanatic war.”¹⁵¹ Clarendon provides the most public and magnificent ideal of the collector, to whom (in Evelyn's epistolary drama) Pepys plays the most appropriate, if more modest and private, late Restoration equivalent. Moreover, whereas Clarendon's art collection is dispersed, his palace demolished,¹⁵² and his political career wrecked,¹⁵³ Evelyn places hope in Pepys's library as a more secure and long-lasting repository of cultural images. Evelyn conveys his determination to repair the damage done to the great art collections and libraries during the civil wars in a generational metaphor of the kind that opens Dryden's “Astrea Redux.” A younger generation must assume the responsibility for reassembling and reanimating a culture that has suffered a series of lacunae not only by war and fire¹⁵⁴ but also by the negligence and greed of prodigal children, even though Clarendon provides an exception.¹⁵⁵

The responsibility of a younger generation to an older one is reflected in a parallel responsibility of the English to themselves. Again, Clarendon provides the perfect vehicle for Evelyn's argument, because his criticisms of “the open and avowed luxury and profaneness which succeeded, [in the Stuart court] à la mode de France”¹⁵⁶ motivated his disgrace and exile to that country. Like the frequent sale of great English collections on the Continent, it is all too easy for a culture intent on dismembering itself to export or otherwise to dispose of those “effigies” (to adopt Evelyn's term) that it finds inconvenient. Evelyn wants to control and regulate the wholesale exportation of cultural artifacts to France, as well as indict the indiscriminate taste for foreign, especially Italian, painting, in order to reinvent and propagate a native virtue and integrity. Thus he unequivocally defends his panegyric to Clarendon (an encapsulation of Clarendon's historic value) in the dedication to his translation of Gabriel Naudé's Advis pour Dresser une Bibliothèque (1627; trans. 1661).¹⁵⁷

The determination to compete with the institutions of French culture (in particular) is both domesticated and cleansed of any associations with pomp and grandeur by a dual metaphor of circulation juxtaposed with a highly specialized conception of space. The circulatory and spatial assumptions driving Evelyn's argument meet in an image of the Thames flowing by Lambeth Palace: like the commerce the Thames allows, the formerly plundered palace can become one of several new loci of cultural wealth, realized most profoundly in terms of books, pictures, and medals. Like Harvey's circulation of the blood, an English discovery that Evelyn remembers here, the circulation of artifacts will restrengthen the sinews of the body politic.¹⁵⁸ And like the library of Lambeth Palace, the new spaces Evelyn imagines as repositories of knowledge (from the virtuoso's cabinet to the Wren library at Cambridge¹⁵⁹) both copy and revise French models, especially the Académie Française. However, whereas Cardinal Mazarin's library and the Académie connote an almost stifling grandeur and a vision of the state control of culture, Evelyn desires a public effect to be achieved by more local and domestic means. The linguistic functions of the Académie are, in Evelyn's imagination, transferred to a group—such as the “three or four meetings … begun at Gray's Inn, by Mr. Cowley, Dr. Sprat, Mr. Waller, the Duke of Buckingham, Matt. Clifford, Mr. Dryden, and some other promoters” of wit¹⁶⁰—which is “brought together into conversation” in “one competent room in [a] gentleman's house.”¹⁶¹

Evelyn is profoundly concerned with the ontic and epistemological status of the artifacts that will compose the counters or currency of his new cultural economy. Evelyn's hostility to art collectors' undiscriminating preference for Italian mythological paintings denotes a wider resistance to the speechless and “dusky lumber” of history.¹⁶² Part of Evelyn's argument is that such representations are not historical enough in nature; because the “real image”¹⁶³ or “instructive types”¹⁶⁴ only achieve power by marking their space in some larger cultural grammar, they must be framed in some way by the contexts and aims of history. This is the purpose of Evelyn's confessedly “promiscuous” but equally prescriptive catalogue of famous individuals, who represent, singly or together, for good or for ill, examples for the kind of society he postulates. As we might expect from the striking mutuality of John and Mary Evelyn's personal and intellectual relationship—Mary evidently accompanied John as an intellectual peer on that famous visit to Oxford in 1654—John Evelyn calculatedly includes women in his ideal society.¹⁶⁵ Indeed, the most vivid individual heading his vast list of historical figures is Helen Cornaro, who, as a member of “one of the most illustrious families of Venice,” refused all offers of marriage and preferred to cultivate a “universal knowledge and erudition,” and died a celebrated public figure.¹⁶⁶ Evelyn, of course, mentions Katherine Philips and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.¹⁶⁷

Evelyn believes that the meaning and eloquence of such portraits derive exclusively from an implicit or explicit context—manufactured from received knowledge or embedded in the image—which explicates their moral and cultural significance. That is, the portrait's significance lies less in its status as a fragment, a piece of isolated historical lumber cast up on the shores of the modern consciousness, than as a synecdoche, a concreted and objectified sign of a history whose movements and motives remain largely unreified and whose true process remains largely inaccessible. Moreover, because writing and inscriptions compose another, larger body of the actual history we inherit, no single historical image more perfectly encapsulates, embodies, and condenses historical significance than the medal, whose emblematic constitution fuses the pictorial and linguistic. Writing under the shadow of Ezekiel Spanheim's revolutionary contributions to numismatics, Evelyn treats the medal as a plastic example of the wider hermeneutical problems attendant on history, for which the Cotton manuscripts also serve as a figure.¹⁶⁸ But medals, though distinct, are also obviously associated with coins—they share a common origin at the mint—and in 1696 Evelyn links their peculiar weight as cultural currency (with its attendant metaphors of circulation and potential inflation) to the current debate on the coinage.¹⁶⁹ By implication, Evelyn's activity of “gathering up all. … Medals as I could anywhere find had been struck before and since the Conquest … relating to any part of good history”¹⁷⁰ seeks at a cultural level to resist the decline of value in “this mercantile nation” by “clipping, debasing, and all other unrighteous ways of perverting the species.”¹⁷¹

Medals, then, bear a special cultural burden, because “we are not only informed whose real image and superscription they bear, but have discovered to us, in their reverses, what heroical exploits they performed; their famous temples, basilicae, thermae, amphitheatres, aquaducts, circuses, naumachias, bridges, triumphal arches, columns, historical and other pompous structures and erections.”¹⁷² Like the Epicurean icon, the medal provides a peculiar arena for the play of instructive images and discourses, which resists the entropy of history.

Evelyn's own strategy of resistance and gathering is captured in his last major publication, the Numismata (1697). Like the museum, the library, and the cabinet, the book now establishes a space for the selection, concentration, and ordering of cultural artifacts (p. 176). And curiously, like the medals that the facticity of the book imitates, the book is itself—as Evelyn is painfully conscious—subject to a process of clipping and debasing. What created in Evelyn the most intense anxiety during the publication of his Essay on Lucretius and equally his Numismata (almost exactly forty years later) are the errors created for posterity by his printer's negligence. Sir Geoffrey Keynes writes that the publication of Numismata “brought no satisfaction to its author, for he was deeply mortified to find that, in spite of the trouble he had taken, it was full of errors and misprints.”¹⁷³ By the intervention of Richard Bentley and Benjamin Tooke, Evelyn was dissuaded from inveighing against these errors in his preface, and he compiled instead “an immense list of Emendata.”¹⁷⁴

Evelyn's response is less explicable as an obsession with tidiness or accuracy as such than as a response to his own aesthetic of cultural imagery. So, again in that historic letter to Pepys, he advises Pepys that because oil paintings are expensive, clumsy, and sporadic vehicles of historical knowledge, a cheaper and more useful device would be to convert his library into a kind of cultural gallery, where, like medals, books enclose the pictorial and verbal. Evelyn advises Pepys “to add to your title-pages, in a distinct volume, the heads and effigies of such [historical figures] as I have enumerated, and of as many others as either this or any other age have been famous for arms and arts, in taille douce, and with very tolerable expense to be procured amongst the printsellers.”¹⁷⁵ As William Rand recognizes in his translation of Gassendi's life of Peiresc, it is finally in the book itself that the life, the image of the life, can be textualized and—like Epicurus's suggrammata, Gassendi's biography of Nicolas-Claude Fabride Peiresc, Bougerel's biography of Gassendi, and Evelyn's own children—can become a kind of statue “living and speaking” to posterity. Similarly, just as Sir William Temple imagines the inhabitants of his ideal Epicurean garden contemplating, within its space, the statues that punctuate it, so Evelyn imagines Pepys standing within the virtuoso's cabinet, turning to his books to contemplate “the effigies of those who have made such a noise and bustle in the world, either by their madness and folly, or a more conspicuous figure by their wit and learning.”¹⁷⁶

If we began the story of neo-Epicureanism by meditating on the relationship between Epicurus's physics, cognitive mechanism, and his own contingent and mediated view of the propagation of the self in the suggrammata, Evelyn now imagines an entire culture, which those series of imaginative relations define. Like the woman in Le Clerc's Ars Critica, Pepys is finally handed to us as an image of the neoclassical reader contemplating the necessarily phenomenal, though atomized, remains of a history he must strenuously and methodically reassemble.

Notes

1. Lucy Hutchinson had already completed a translation of Lucretius in manuscript (see BM Add. MS 19.333). She refers to making the translation while attending to her young children, which probably places the translation in the 1640s, taking a cue from her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 33-34.

2. John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura Interpreted and Made English Verse (London, 1656), 109. Sixteen hundred and fifty-six was a year of wonders, in that it also saw the publication of Walter Charleton's Epicurus's Morals, following the publication of his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (London, 1654).

3. I adopt Joy's argument that Gassendi's Animadversiones, never printed entire in the Opera Omnia, represents Gassendi's most synthetic philosophical oeuvre prior to the publication of the large Syntagma Philosophicum (1658), which Evelyn could not have known in 1656. Although she refers to Evelyn's translation of Lucretius, Joy does not seem to notice that it adumbrates a comprehensive grasp of Gassendi's published work and therefore indicates a knowledge of Gassendi in circles that were profoundly to influence Restoration culture. Evelyn cites many of Gassendi's works, including the Animadversiones in his Essay at 109; 110; 123; 131; 135; 136; 138 [Animadversiones]; 147; 169; 172 [Animadversiones]. See Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 70. The specificity of relations between Gassendi and English cultural figures is suggested by the striking fact that the figure of Epicurus on the title page of Gassendi's De Vita et Moribus Epicuri (1647) and his Animadversiones (1649) is virtually identical to the frontispiece of Walter Charleton's Epicurus' Morals (1656) (see pp. 153-54 above). The image of Epicurus is almost literally and physically the vehicle of cultural transmission.

4. Writing to Jeremy Taylor on 27 April 1656, Evelyn says that “my Essay upon Lucretius, which I told you was engaged, is now printing, and (as I understand) near finished: my animadversions upon it will I hope provide against all the ill consequences, and totally acquit me either of glory or impiety” (Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S., 4 vols. [London: Bohn, 1859], 3:73). References to Evelyn's letters are to this edition and will appear as Corres.

5. Evelyn, Essay, Sig. A6^v.

6. William Rand, trans., The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility. Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius Lord of Peiresk, Senator of the Parliament at Aix. Written by the Learned Petrus Gassendus … (London, 1657), Sig. A3^v.

7. Ibid., Sig. A6^r.

8. Ibid., 6:202. The book has odd pagination, so my references may appear slightly misleading.

9. Ibid., 6:203.

10. Ibid., 6:204.

11. Ibid.

12. A classic case occurs in Marie Boas's monograph “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy,” Osiris 10 (1952): 412-541, a canonical text in the historiography of midcentury natural philosophy. For Boas, Bacon and Descartes are the two “heroes” of the story. I am proposing that, in contrast to the attention lavished on these two hugely authoritative figures, we also admire less epic—and perhaps more enduring—values for the narrative of cultural history.

13. Evelyn, Essay, Sig. A3^r.

14. Ibid., Sig. A5^r.

15. See Richard Westfall, “Some Unpublished Boyle Papers Relating to Scientific Method,” Annals of Science 12 (1956): 63-73; 103-17.

16. I refer to Evelyn's Essay on … Lucretius (1656) and to Thomas Creech's translation of De Rerum Natura, which appeared first in 1682, but reappeared regularly thereafter. The “third edition” of Creech's translation, published in 1683, includes a series of poems to Creech by such authors as Evelyn, Nahum Tate, Thomas Otway, Aphra Behn, and E[dmund] W[aller]. Dryden translated parts of Lucretius in Sylvae (1685).

17. A careful assessment of relations between Descartes and More is to be found in Alan Gabbey, “Philosophia Cartesiana Triumphata: Henry More (1646-1671),” in Problems of Cartesianism, ed. Thomas H. Lennon et al. (Kingston, Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1982), 171-250.

18. See, for example, Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 146, and the commentary on Sprat in Charles Webster, “The Origins of the Royal Society,” History of Science 6 (1967): 116-19.

19. R. H. Kargon describes how William Boswell, who inherited Bacon's manuscripts and in response to the emergence of the mechanical hypothesis, arranged to have his atomistic works, inter alia, published in 1653, under the title Scripta in Naturalia et Universalia Philosophia (Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966], 52).

20. Brian Vickers, for example, shows that the polemics surrounding the nature of language in the Restoration had less to do with substance than the institutional position of the combatants: the appropriation of Bacon was primarily symbolic (“The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985], 3-76).

21. See, variously, Robert G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), chap. 4; A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 166-68; Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), passim; M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 90-100; and Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (1971; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 114.

22. See, for example, John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 7, which stresses Locke's Baconianism.

23. This is the distinction that Evelyn communicates between Boyle's critical method and Bacon's less discriminate inductivism. See Corres., 3:348: Talking of Boyle, Evelyn writes that “never did stubborn matter come under his inquisition but he extorted a confession of all that lay in her most intimate recesses; and what he discovered he as faithfully registered, and frankly communicated; in this exceeding my Lord Verulam, who (though never to be mentioned without honour and admiration) was used to tell all that came to hand without much examination.”

24. See Thomas Sprat, Observations on Monsieur Sorbière's Voyage into England (London, 1665), 233-34: “I scarce know two men in the World, that have more different colors of Speech, than these two great Witts: the Lord Bacon short, allusive, and abounding with Metaphors: Mr. Hobbs round, close, sparing of similitudes: but ever extraordinary decent in them. The one's way of reas'ning, proceeds on particulars, and pleasant images, only suggesting new ways of experimenting, without any pretence to the Mathematicks. The other's bold, resolv'd, setled upon general conclusions, and in them, if we will believe his Friend, Dogmatical.”

25. Samuel Sorbière, Relation d'un Voyage en Angleterre, Ou sont Touchées Plusieurs Choses, qui Regardent l'Estat des Sciences, et de la Religion, et Autres Matières Curieuses (Paris, 1664).

26. Sprat, Observations, 110-11.

27. Ibid., 180.

28. Sorbière, Relation, 91; 93.

29. Ibid., 92.

30. Ibid., 94; 82-83.

31. Sprat, Observations, 241-42.

32. See Thomas Franklin Mayo, Epicurus in England, 1650-1725 (Dallas: Southwest Press, 1934), 170.

33. The National Union Catalogue and Short Title Catalogue record the following publications for Gassendi: Institutio Astronomica (1653; anr. ed., 1653; 1674; 1675; 1683; 1702); Institutio Logica et Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma (1660; 1668); The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility (1657); Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty (1699); and The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology (1659; anr. ed., 1659). I have also shown that the section on Epicurus in volume three of Thomas Stanley's popular History of Philosophy (1655-62; vol. 3: 1659) is a translation of Gassendi's Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma. And, finally, Walter Charleton's Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654) is often treated as a redaction of Gassendist views.

34. The Short Title Catalogue and the Gallery of Ghosts record the following titles for Descartes: A Discourse of Method (1649); Renati Descartes Epistolae (1668; 1683); Ethice (1685); Renatus Descartes Excellent Compendium of Music (1653); Exercitationes (1685); R. des Cartes Meditationes (1664; anr. ed., 1664); The Passions of the Soule (1650); Principia Philosophiae (1664); Six Metaphysical Meditations (1680); Specrmene Philosophiae (1667); and The Use of the Geometrical Playing Cards (1697).

35. See C. T. Harrison, “The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 45 (1934): 1-79; and “Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, and the Ancient Atomists,” Harvard University Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 15 (1933): 191-218.

36. Harrison, “Ancient Atomists,” 23.

37. Kargon, Atomism in England, chap. 8; Harrison, “Ancient Atomists,” 56ff. A particularly vivid example of the degree to which influential writers were acquainted with neo-Epicureanism is Edward Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae: Or a Rational Account of the Grounds of the Christian Faith (1662; 3d ed., Cambridge, 1701). Already in 1662, Stillingfleet records “the Atomical or Epicurean Hypothesis” as “that which makes most noise in the World” (301), and, though he attacks its materialist implications, he actually seeks to subordinate the atomic hypothesis to providence. One device Stillingfleet uses is to attack the potential dogmatism of Epicurean physics by resorting to Epicurus's own probabilistic criteria for knowledge in his canon (303). Stillingfleet displays a considerable acquaintance with Gassendi's Opera Omnia (e.g., 307; 309).

38. Cudworth pushes Greek atomism back to Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras, accusing Democritus and Leucippus of being “the first atheizers of this ancient Atomic physiology” (The True Intellectual System of the Universe, ed. Thomas Birch, 4 vols. [London: R. Priestley, 1820], 1:53); and John Smith, attacking Epicurus in great detail, reminds his readers that Democritus was “the first Author” of the atomic thesis (Select Discourses [London, 1660], 47).

39. See for example, Kargon's comment on The Origin of Forms and Qualities in Atomism in England, 99.

40. Slaughter writes, however, that “for the most part, the early Royal Society was firm in asserting its opposition to hypothetical physics. … The ‘empirics’ rejected all theories and asserted the primacy of natural history—of the minute observation of phenomena and the recording of data” (Universal Languages, 190). She sees Locke as a hypotheticalist and Boyle and Hooke as “empirics.” These dichotomies seem too absolute.

41. M. A. Stewart, ed. and intro., Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1979), xxx.

42. Richard S. Westfall, “Some Unpublished Boyle Papers Relating to Scientific Method,” Annals of Science 12 (1956): 63-73; 103-17.

43. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 1:53.

44. Danton B. Sailor, “Moses and Atomism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1964): 3-16; see also E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science: The Scientific Thinking of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Their Contemporaries (1924; reprint, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), 149.

45. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 1:20.

46. Ibid., 2:123.

47. Cudworth must be one of the last people to have defended the authenticity of the hermetic corpus against Isaac Casaubon's devastating criticisms of it (True Intellectual System, 2:124-30). For Isaac Casaubon's effect on hermeticism, see Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 78-93; Grafton is elaborating in part the suggestion of Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Vintage, 1964), 423-37.

48. Henry More also shares something of this peculiar midcentury ambivalence toward atomism and method. For a discussion of the difference between More and Stillingfleet on these and related issues, see Alison Coudert, “Limits of Latitudinarianism: Henry More's Reaction to the Kabbala and Quakerism”; and Sarah Hutton, “Neoplatonism and Latitudinarianism: Henry More, Edward Stillingfleet and the Decline of Moses Atticus,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), ed. Richard W. F. Kroll et al. John Tulloch provides a critique of Cudworth's uncritical method: see Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1872), 2:479-80; and Joseph M. Levine refers to More's “hopelessly unhistorical” use of the ancient wisdom (“Latitudinarians, Neoplatonists, and the Ancient Wisdom,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion).

49. True Intellectual System, 2:64.

50. Ibid., 4:211.

51. Ibid., 2:328.

52. Theophilus Gale, The Court of the Gentiles: Or A Discourse Touching the Original of Human Literature, both Philologie and Philosophie, from the Scriptures, and Jewish Church (London, 1669), Sig. π3^r; italics reversed.

53. Ibid., Sig π2^v.

54. Ibid., Sig. π3^r; italics reversed.

55. Ibid., 14.

56. See Thomas Harmon Jobe, “The Devil in Restoration Science,” Isis 72 (1981): 343-56.

57. Richard Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1692; 5th ed. entitled Eight Sermons Preach'd at the Honourable Robert Boyle's Lecture [London, 1724]).

58. Ibid., 125.

59. Ibid., 61.

60. Mayo, Epicurus in England, 191-92.

61. Thomas Creech, trans., T. Lucretius Carus, Of the Nature of Things (London, 1715). Creech died in 1700. Cosmo Alexander Gordon points out that the ‘1715’ edition is a state of the 1714 edition (A Bibliography of Lucretius [London: Hart-Davis, 1962], 178-79). He also suggest that the additional reflections are by John Digby, the translator of Epicurus' Morals (ibid., 171).

62. See chapter four above, n.6.

63. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, chap. 9.

64. See Kargon, Atomism in England, chaps. 8 and 9.

65. J. B. van Helmont, Deliramenta Catarrhi, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650); A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650).

66. Kargon, Atomism in England, 86.

67. See Richard W. F. Kroll, “The Question of Locke's Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 339-59. Although I demonstrate this fact, I mistake the ‘small’ Syntagma (1649)—which Stanley translated—for Gassendi's ‘large,’ final Syntagma Philosophicum (1658).

68. See “An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Stanley, Esq.,” in Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 3d ed. (London, 1701), Sig. d1^v.

69. The National Union Catalogue records the following: The History of Chaldaic Philosophy (1662; 1687; 1701); and The Life of Socrates (1701).

70. See The Evelyn Library, 4 vols. (London: Christie's, 1977-78), 3, item #1409; John Harrison and Peter Laslett, eds., The Library of John Locke, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), item ##758; 2755; John Harrison, ed., The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), item ##1551-1552.

71. Jackson I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist (Saint Louis: Washington Univ. Studies, 1956), 133-39.

72. Stanley writes that “the Learned Gassendus was my precedent” (The History of Philosophy, Sig. π2^r).

73. Ibid., Sig. π2^v (italics reversed).

74. Additionally, Bernier's important Abrégé de la Philosophie de Mr. Gassendi (Paris, 1674) was issued five times in the first ten years of its existence.

75. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 33.

76. For details of Evelyn's life, see the introduction to E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 1:1-43.

77. Thomas Stanley, Historia Philosophiae (Leipzig, 1711). In the section devoted to Epicurus (pt. 12, 924-1110), there are sixty-seven references to the Animadversiones in the marginalia, almost exactly half of them in the section on ethics.

78. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, ed. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (1944; reprint, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1963), 126; 128.

79. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, 2d ed., 6 vols. (London, 1772), 6:724.

80. Ibid., 1:194.

81. Ibid., 1:222.

82. Kargon, Atomism in England, 63; and Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, 90-93.

83. Helen Hervey, “Hobbes and Descartes in the Light of Some Unpublished Letters of the Correspondence between Sir Charles Cavendish and Dr. John Pell,” Osiris, 10 (1952): 67-90.

84. In the dedication to The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Rand mentions his friendship with Hartlib (“Harlib”), who had ten years previously recommended Gassendi's life of Peiresc to him (Sig. A3^r).

85. Robert Vaughan, D.D., ed., The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and the State of Europe during the Early Part of the Reign of Louis XIV, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), 2:367-68.

86. Ibid., 2:370.

87. Hervey, “Hobbes and Descartes,” 78.

88. Ibid., 73.

89. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England, from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to that of Charles the Second (London: London Historical Society of Science, 1841), 86.

90. Ibid., 87.

91. Vaughan, Protectorate, 2:371-72.

92. Hervey, “Hobbes and Descartes,” 73.

93. Ibid., 85.

94. Halliwell-Phillips, Collection of Letters, 80.

95. Ibid.

96. Hervey, “Hobbes and Descartes,” 78.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid., 80.

100. Boyle, Works, 1:xli.

101. Ibid., 6:76.

102. Ibid., 1:xxxvii.

103. Ibid., 1:xli.

104. Ibid., 1:xxxviii.

105. Ibid., 1:xxxix.

106. Ibid., 1:xl.

107. Ibid. This metaphor of coinage also occurs in Rand's translation of Gassendi's life of Peiresc.

108. On the role of corresponding societies and learned colleges, see Charles Webster, ed., Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 30.

109. Gassendi, De Vita et Moribus Epicuri (Lyon, 1647), Sigs. II2^v-II3^r. It was approved on 5 August 1647.

110. Boyle, Works, 6:77.

111. Ibid.

112. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 9 vols. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965-73), 2:42. In Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, Boyle writes in praise of Epicurus: “And as confident as those we speak of use to be, of knowing the true and adequate causes of things, yet Epicurus himself, as appears by ancient testimony, and by his own writings, was more modest, not only contenting himself, on many occasions, to propose several possible ways, whereby a phaenomenon may be accounted for, but sometimes seeming to dislike the so pitching upon any one explication, as to exclude and reject all others: and some modern philosophers, that much favour his doctrine, do likewise imitate his example, in pretending to assign not precisely the true, but possible causes of the phaenomenon they endeavour to explain” (Works, 2:45).

113. See E. S. de Beer, introduction to The Diary of John Evelyn, 1:10. And also Evelyn's own dedication to Sir Richard Browne in Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer'd to Solitude (London, 1667), Sigs. A4^v-A5^r: “I might here mention the constant Asylum which the Persecuted Clergy found within your walls upon all occasions. … When your Chappel was the Church of England in her most glorious estate.” For a description of the state of the church in exile during the Interregnum, see R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649-1662 (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1951), chap. 2.

114. Taylor to Evelyn, 16 April 1656, Corres., 3:71. See also Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 32ff., for a commentary on the epistemological and literary significance of the Ciceronian dialogue.

115. Like De Rerum Natura, the Tusculanian Disputations occur in five movements.

116. For example, Evelyn's correspondents include Wilkins, Sprat, Boyle, Hartlib, Jeremy Taylor, Pepys, Clifford, Creech, Meric Casaubon, Lady Margaret Cavendish, Wotton, Sir Thomas Browne, and Glanvill.

117. Charleton predicts a relationship between reading and friendship in Epicurus's Morals, when he writes to his reader that “if the Rule hold, that Similitude of Opinions, is an argument of Similitude in Affections, and Similitude of Affections the ground of Love and friendship, certainly I am not altogether destitute of support for my conjectures, and consequently that you will soone admitt him [Epicurus] into your bosome” (Sig. A4^r).

118. On the Taylor-Evelyn friendship, see Tulloch, Rational Theology, 1:366-67. Jeremy Taylor's A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship with Rules of Conducting it. Written in answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M.[rs] K.[atharine] P.[hilips] (London, 1657; reprint, London: Chapman and Hall, 1920) includes an appendix consisting of two exemplary letters.

119. Taylor to Evelyn, Corres., 3:94.

120. Ibid., 3:97.

121. Evelyn records in his diary that he began planting for his garden on 17 January 1653: “This was the beginning of all the succeeding Gardens, Walkes, Groves, Enclosures & Plantations there.” See John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), 3:80.

122. In his diary, Evelyn records a number of visits to Sayes Court, mostly by royalists, including King Charles II himself. But the entry for 1 May 1657 reads: “There had ben at my house this afternoone Laurence president of Olivers Council, & some other of his Court Lords to see my Garden and plantations.”

123. Taylor, Discourse, 58.

124. Ibid., 59.

125. Rand, Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Sig. A6^r.

126. For bibliographic commentary, as well as illustrations of the Jansson and Marolles frontispieces, see Cosmo Alexander Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), 135-36; 154-55; and 172-75.

127. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., has suggested in conversation that Mary Evelyn's early training in Renaissance iconology could have come to her in France, through the second school of Fontainebleau.

128. For a reading of this icon, see Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spencer's “Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), 23-26.

129. Interestingly, Evelyn himself describes the revision or rendering orthodox of cultural figures in terms of the activity of denuding a female image (Evelyn to Taylor, 27 April 1656, Corres., 3:73-74).

130. Evelyn was himself to design the famous frontispiece to Sprat's History of the Royal Society.

131. See John Wilkins to Evelyn, 16 August 1656, Corres., 3:76; and Evelyn to Meric Casaubon, 15 July 1674, Corres., 3:246-47.

132. Taylor to Evelyn, 9 October 1656, Corres., 3:78n.

133. Evelyn to William Wotton, 30 March 1696, Corres., 3:349.

134. Taylor to Evelyn, 9 October 1656, Corres., 3:72.

135. Taylor to Evelyn, 29 August 1657, Corres., 3:98ff.

136. Taylor to Evelyn, 9 October 1656, Corres., 3:73.

137. Evelyn to Wotton, 12 September 1703, Corres., 3:391.

138. Evelyn to Mr. Maddox, 10 January 1656-7, Corres., 3:85; see also Evelyn to Wotton, 30 March 1696, Corres., 3:346.

139. Evelyn to Wotton, 12 September 1703, Corres., 3:395-96. The myth demonstrates by an almost parabolic narrative that the two families are allied by blood.

140. Diary, 10 July 1654.

141. See Evelyn to Wotton, 12 September 1703, Corres., 3:391.

142. Evelyn to Robert Boyle, 9 August 1659, Corres., 3:114.

143. Ibid., 3:115.

144. Evelyn to Lord Viscount Cornbury, 9 September 1665, Corres., 3:167. Later, we discover in a letter to Pepys that Durdans is also one of those loci in which cultural artifacts are being gathered.

145. Evelyn to Boyle, 3 September 1659, Corres., 3:116.

146. Ibid., 3:117.

147. Ibid.

148. Ibid., 3:119.

149. Ibid., 116.

150. Evelyn to Samuel Pepys, 12 August 1689, Corres., 3:295.

151. Ibid., 3:304; 308.

152. Ibid., 3:295.

153. Ibid., 3:302.

154. Evelyn mentions that Prince Henry's collection of ten thousand medals was dispersed by the Civil War (ibid., 3:305-6); he also fears that Ashmole's collection may have been destroyed by fire (ibid., 3:299).

155. Ibid., 3:300.

156. Ibid., 3:302.

157. See Evelyn, Instructions concerning Erecting of a Library (London, 1661); and Corres., 3:303: “Yes, he was a great lover at least of books, and furnished a very ample library, writ himself an elegant style, favoured and promoted the design of the Royal Society; and it was for this, and in particular, for his being very kind to me both abroad and at home, that I sent Naudaeus to him in a dedicatory address, of which I am not so much ashamed as of the translation.”

158. Evelyn uses an extended image of dismemberment (Corres., 3:309) and also refers to the new mode of writing as embodying “nervous, natural strength, and beauty, genuine and of our own growth” (ibid., 3:311).

159. Evelyn refers to Wren's “sumptuous structure” (Corres., 3:306).

160. Corres., 3:311.

161. Ibid., 3:310.

162. Ibid., 3:297.

163. Ibid.

164. Ibid., 3:304.

165. For example, Evelyn refers us to “sundry more of that fair sex who ruled the world” (ibid., 3:298).

166. Corres., 3:298.

167. Ibid., 3:296.

168. Ibid., 3:299.

169. Evelyn to Lord Godolphin, 16 June 1696, Corres., 3:354ff.

170. Ibid., 3:354.

171. Ibid., 3:355.

172. Evelyn to Pepys, 12 August 1689, Corres., 3:297.

173. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, John Evelyn: A Study in Bibliophily with a Bibliography of His Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 231.

174. Ibid.

175. Evelyn to Pepys, 12 August 1689, Corres., 3:303-4.

176. Ibid., 3:304.