his actual invention to a particular kind of glass bottle, yet he was an
eager student and populariser of the work of Bacon, Galileo, and Harvey;
and his laboratories were the nursing grounds of the new experimental
philosophy.

With a distinctly rationalistic temper, he was yet a faithful, if
independent, son of the Roman Church. He speaks sometimes as if he regarded
the Church as the great storehouse of necessary authority for the
intellectually feeble; but he accepted the main dogmas himself, being
satisfied of them by intuition and reason. Protestantism, he held, was not
for the ordinary person, considering "the natural imbecility of man's wits
and understandings." His piety was a thing apart, a matter of heredity
perhaps, and of his poetic temperament. I have heard him called by that
abused name, "mystic." He was nothing of the sort, and he said so in
memorable words. As an act of devotion he translated the _Adhering to God_
of Albertus Magnus. In the dedication to his mother he compares himself, as
the translator of this mystic treatise, to certain travellers who "speak
upon hearsay of countries they were never in." "The various course in the
world that I have runne myself out of breath in, hath afforded me little
means for solid recollection." Yet was he now and then upon the threshold.
With streaks of the quack and adventurer in him, he gave out deep notes.
Says Lloyd: "His soul [was] one of those few souls that understand
themselves."

With an itch to use his pen as well as his tongue, he had none of the
patience, the hankering after perfection of form, of the professional man
of letters. His account of his Scanderoon exploit, a sea-log, a little
written-up later, was perhaps not meant for publication. It did not see the
light till 1868. His _Memoirs_ were written, he says, "for my own
recreation, and then continued and since preserved only for my own private