180 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Papers. The new philosophy made headway, however, against all 

 opposition, and one by one "cast down the old idols of prejudice, 

 superstition, and ancient authority ; it gave a few new images to the 

 transition poets, and to Milton and Burnet a new conception of 

 the illimitable expanse of the universe. 



Satiric comedy exploited the new interest as a humor, after 

 the manner of Ben Jonson. First touched upon in Shackerley 

 Marmion's The Antiquary (1641), it was developed by Shadwell 

 into that arch-type of the virtuoso. Sir Nicholas Gimcrack {The 

 Virtuoso, 1667). The exploitation continued through Durfey, 

 Aphra Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, Colley Gibber, and others, ending so 

 far as this study is concerned with the anonymous State of Physich 

 (1642). Wlierever the new scientist appears in comedy, with a 

 single exception (Dr. Easy, The State of Physick), he receives the 

 merited contempt of all men, because he is a pedantic "fool", en- 

 gaged in the pursuit of useless knowledge. "I believe," said Snarl, 

 the cynic, "if the Blood of an Ass were transfus'd into a virtuoso, 

 you would not be able to know the Emittent Ass from the Recipi- 

 ent Philosopher, by the Mass".^ This is the consensus of satiric 

 opinion. The virtuoso was never generally distinguished from the 

 quack doctor and the astrologer; remnants of the occult sciences 

 still clung to him, such as alchemy, the Rosicrucian mysteries, and 

 astrology. The severest censure was based upon the scientist 's 

 waste of money in buying scientific apparatus and "rarities", and 

 in pursuing studies that could never benefit himself or anyone 

 else, — in "studjdng not his country's good but her insects". That 

 this satire was generally unmerited and unjust has been made 

 sufficiently clear. Doubtless there were pedants in plenty, as 

 there ever are, but neither the great men nor their great achieve- 

 ments were appreciated by the writers of comedy. The virtuoso 

 never invented anything so useful as a mouse-trap, said the satir- 

 ists; yet the air-pump, the thermometer, the microscope, the im- 

 proved telescope, the barometer, and the steam-engine came out 

 of this period. A bricklayer is worth forty philosophers, averred 

 the satirists; yet Hooke, Boyle, Ray, Willughby, Grew, Mayow, 

 Lower, Sydenham, Sloane, Newton, to say nothing of the foreigners 

 closely associated with the new interest, as Leeuwenhoek, Malpighi, 



» Shadwell's The Virtuoso, Act II. 



