WILLIAM BARLOWE. 337 



thus betraying the innocent belief that the accumulated 

 ecclesiastical influence which he wielded, because of his 

 filial relation to one bishop and his fraternal relation to the 

 four others whom his sisters had espoused, would secure 

 for him, from the briny mariner afloat, the same sort of 

 favor which, ashore, finally landed him in the comfortable 

 Archdiaconate of Salisbury. 



Barlowe, however, was far more deeply interested in Gil- 

 bert's magnetical experiments than Wright, because he 

 was making similar researches himself. It has been 

 claimed 1 for him that he had "knowledge in the magnet n 

 twenty years before Gilbert's book appeared, and that he 

 was accounted superior, or at least equal, to Gilbert as a 

 "searcher and finder out of many rare and magnetical 

 secrets ;" but there is nothing to substantiate this in any- 

 thing Barlowe ever published. He certainly was in no 

 hurry to give to the world either his own magnetical re- 

 searches, or to express his approval of those of his friend. 

 He owed his earlier advancement to the friendship of 

 Essex, whom, to his credit be it said, he did not desert in 

 adversity, and to whom he ministered even on the scaffold; 

 and then, in the next reign, he became chaplain to the 

 Prince of Wales, on his way to his final preferment ; so 

 that, even if he had been a Copernican at heart, which he 

 was not, it would have been to the last degree impolitic for 

 him to have rushed into an endorsement of a work wherein 

 the proscribed theory was so strenuously maintained. Be- 

 sides, in 1605 came Bacon's earliest fling at Gilbert the 

 first English criticism of the De Magnete from an eminent 

 source and that this had a deterrent influence upon him 

 may also be conceived. But there was a great deal of 

 human nature in Barlowe, revealing itself with more than 

 common transparency. He did not dare, in 1600, to chal- 

 lenge Gilbert's priority to himself, nor even then to make 

 public his own alleged discoveries ; but when, in 1613, 

 another Richmond suddenly leaped into the field in the 



1 Wood: Athense Oxouienses, London, 1813, Vol. II, 375. 

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