THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS OF NEWTON. 671 



the concentration, disinterestedness, and, above all, the indefeasible 

 patience, which mark the highest order of minds. Among the con- 

 temporaries of Newton, he approached most nearly to and contrasted 

 most strongly with that great man, whose shining qualities and achieve- 

 ments have been set off by the convenient foil of his rival's defects of 

 temper and fortune. It may perhaps be possible to derive a larger les- 

 son from the consideration of his life's work than the trite moral con- 

 veyed .by his exhibition in the character of the captive in the car of 

 triumphant genius. In Newton the epoch was idealized ; in Hooke it 

 was simply reflected. We can study more conveniently the varying 

 impulses and undefined aspirations of a period of transition and prog- 

 ress in the versatility which obeyed than in the steady purpose which 

 transformed and dominated them. The greatest men are of all time ; 

 the lesser are an epitome of their age. They pass with it ; but they 

 teach in passing. 



Hooke believed himself to be the disciple of Bacon ; but his real 

 instructors were men of a widely different and far less pretentious 

 stamp. Experimental science does not date, even in England, from 

 the " Chancellor of England and of Nature." Roma ante Romulum 

 fait. The Egremont Castle of traditional knowledge shook, it is true, 

 to its foundations at the formidable blast of this new Sir Eustace, and 

 the Peripatetic usurper heard in it his knell. But the fortress was al- 

 ready dismantled ; a numerous and unrelenting foe had silently taken 

 possession of its outworks and bastions, and, stone by stone, was busy 

 turning the materials of the ancient stronghold to account in the con- 

 struction of habitations of more modern aspect and accommodation. 



Among the multifarious forms of activity stirred into life by the 

 ferment of the Italian Renaissance, perhaps the least questionable in 

 its results was that leading to the love and study of nature. Two men 

 of singular genius, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, led 

 the way ; and their example was followed by the astronomers, anato- 

 mists, physicians, and botanists, with whom, in the following century, 

 Italy abounded. Mathematics were at the same time cultivated with 

 signal success ; and the learned enthusiasm which, a hundred yeai's 

 earlier, had hailed the unearthing of a long-forgotten codex by Poggio 

 or Filelfo, now greeted the solution of a problem by Cardano, or the 

 discovery of a formula by Ferri or Tartaglia. Nor did these abstract 

 inquiries remain long unfruitful. The questions which had busied the 

 brain of Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse began to emerge from 

 the neglect of wellnigh eighteen centuries, and the " mechanical pow- 

 ers " of lever, pulley, screw, and inclined plane were once more, as our 

 neighbors say, the order of the day. The movement was now no 

 longer limited to the sub- Alpine peninsula. Simon Stevin, of far-away 

 Bruges, and Michael Varro, of Geneva, deserve to be named, with 

 Benedetti, of Venice, and Del Monte, of Pesaro, as the precursors of 

 Galileo, whose strongest title to fame is that he first brought natural 



