OPPOSITION OF LITERARY CIRCLES 45 



but an important one, of the numerous subjects that had engaged 

 its attention, there were sure to be many ready to have their joke 

 at the expense of the philosophers. On the stage they were held 

 up to ridicule by Shadwell in his comedy of' The Virtuoso' (1676). 

 This dramatist, who, according to Dryden, ' never deviated into 

 sense,' must have perused with some diligence the early numbers 

 of the Philosophical Transactions in order to gather material 

 for his farcical travesty. Samuel Butler indulged his caustic 

 humour on the same subject, satirizing the Society in his ludi- 

 crous ' Elephant in the Moon ', and enumerating 



Their learned speculations. 

 And all their constant occupations. 

 To measure wind, and weigh the air, 

 And turn a circle to a square. 1 



Among the wits of Queen Anne's reign it continued to be the 

 practice to disparage the virtuosi in general and the Fellows of 

 the Royal Society in particular. Addison, for instance, in the 

 ' Spectator' for December 31, 1711, wrote : 



' Among those advantages which the public may reap from this paper, it is 

 not the least that it draws men's minds off from the bitterness of party, and 

 furnishes them with subjects of discourse that may be treated without warmth 

 or passion. This is said to have been the first design of those gentlemen who 

 set on foot the Royal Society ; and had then a very good effect, as it turned 

 many of the greatest geniuses of that age to the disquisitions of natural 

 knowledge, who, if they had engaged in politics with the same parts and 

 application, might have set their country in a flame. The air-pump, the 

 barometer, the quadrant, and the like inventions were thrown out to those 



1 It is unnecessary to notice the attacks of the minor and now forgotten cavillers the 

 Stubbes and Crosses and others who for various reasons assailed the infant Society. 

 Various foreigners who visited London have left their impressions of the Royal Society. 

 One of the earliest of these, Samuel Sorbiere, has given a kindly appreciation of the 

 Society and its Fellows in a little volume, ' Relation d'un voyage en Angleterre,' published 

 in Paris in 1664. He was elected into the Society and his name appears in the list of the 

 original Fellows. In 1710 London was visited by Z. C. von Uffenbach, who appears to 

 have seen little to admire and much to find fault with in the habitation of the Society at 

 Gresham College, the condition of its Repository, the character of the later volumes of the 

 Philosophical Transactions, and the standing of its Fellows, most of whom he regarded as 

 mere apothecaries and such-like persons, who hardly understood Latin (' Merkwiirdige 

 Reisen,' Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1753, vol. iii, p. 545 sq.). Faujas de Saint Fond, who 

 saw a good deal of the Royal Society in 1784 when Sir Joseph Banks was President, has 

 left a much more favourable account of it ('Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecos.se/ &c., 

 tome I, chap, i and ii, Paris, 1797). 



