with encomium; Malebranche quotes him as an authority; Puffendorff expressed admiration of him; the University of Oxford presented to him, after his fall, an address, in which he is termed “a mighty Hercules, who had by his own hand greatly advanced those pillars in the learned world which by the rest of the world were supposed immovable.” Leibnitz ascribed to him the revival of true philosophy; Newton had studied him so closely that he adopted even his phraseology; Voltaire and D’Alembert have rendered him popular in France. The modern philosophers of all Europe regard him reverentially as the father of experimental
He attempted at this late period of his life a metrical translation into English of the Psalms of David; although his prose is full of poetry, his verse has but little of the divine art.
He again declined to take his seat as a peer in Charles’s second Parliament; but the last stage of his life displayed more dignity and real greatness than the “pride, pomp, and circumstance” of his high offices and honors. The public of England and of “foreign nations” forgot the necessity of “charitable speeches” and anticipated “the next ages.” The most distinguished foreigners repaired to Gray’s Inn to pay their respects to him. The Marquis d’Effiat, who brought over to England the Princess Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles the First, went to see him. Bacon, confined to his bed, but unwilling to decline the visit, received him with the curtains drawn. “You resemble the angels,” said the French minister to him, “we hear those beings continually talked of; we believe them superior to mankind; and we never have the consolation to see them.”
But in ill health and infirmity he continued his studies and experiments; as it occurred to him that snow might preserve animal substances from putrefaction as well as salt, he tried the experiment, and stuffed a fowl with snow with his own hands.