His craving courtiers and mistresses, by whom he was perpetually surrounded, engrossed all his expense, and left him neither money nor attention for literary merit.

His contemporary Lewis, who fell short of the king's genius and knowledge in this particular, much exceeded him in liberality.

Besides pensions conferred on learned men throughout all Europe, his academies were directed by rules and supported by salaries; a generosity which does great honor to his memory; and, in the eyes of all the ingenious part of mankind, will be esteemed an atonement for many of the errors of his reign.

We may be surprised that this example should not be more followed by princes; since it is certain that that bounty, so extensive, so beneficial, and so much celebrated, cost not this monarch so great a sum as is often conferred on one useless, overgrown favorite or courtier.
But though the French Academy of Sciences was directed, encouraged, and supported by the sovereign, there arose in England some men of superior genius, who were more than sufficient to cast the balance, and who drew on themselves and on their native country the regard and attention of Europe.

Besides Wilkins, Wren, Wallis, eminent mathematicians, Hooke, an accurate observer by microscopes, and Sydenham, the restorer of true physic, there flourished during this period a Boyle and a Newton; men who trod with cautious, and therefore the more secure steps, the only road which leads to true philosophy.
Boyle improved the pneumatic engine, invented by Otto Guericke, and was thereby enabled to make several new and curious experiments on the air, as well as on other bodies: his chemistry is much admired by those who are acquainted with that art: his hydrostatics contain a greater mixture of reasoning and invention with experiment than any other of his works; but his reasoning is still remote from that boldness and temerity which had led astray so many philosophers.