1 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London … (1667), 417.

² Sprat’s hugely influential polemical account of the Royal Society has been adopted wholesale by such modern commentators as Richard Jones (‘Science and English Prose Style, 1650–1675’ [1951], repr. in Stanley Fish, ed., Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 53–89), who argued that the Royal Society was categorically hostile to poetry, and Joseph M. Levine, who describes it as denigrating the imagination (‘Strife in the Republic of Letters’, in Hans Bot and Françoise Waquet, eds., Commercium Litterarium: Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters [Amsterdam and Maarson: APA-Holland University Press, 1994], 306). See Brian Vickers’s important corrective discussion of this tradition, ‘The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment’, in Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Streuver, eds., Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: UCLA/Clark Library, 1985), 1–76; and John R. R. Christie’s vigorous and compelling account of this misrepresentation (‘Introduction: Rhetoric and Writing in Early Modern Philosophy and Science’) in Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie, eds., The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 1–9.

³ Robert M. Schuler, however, argues that Bacon is genuinely ambivalent about the poetic in scientific writing: ‘Francis Bacon and Scientific Poetry’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, NS 82.2 (1992): 1–65.

⁴ Jonathan Sawday makes this sensible observation in ‘The Transparent Man and the King’s Heart’, in Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt, eds., The Arts of Seventeenth-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 12.

⁵ Peter Harrison, ‘“The Fashioned Image of Poetry or the Regular Instruction of Philosophy?” Truth, Utility, and the Natural Scientist in Early Modern England’, in Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, eds., Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 20.

⁶ Sprat, History, 416.

⁷ I borrow this useful term from Steven Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science, 14 (1984): 481–520.

⁸ Sprat, History, 111. But, as Catherine Gimelli Martin notes, Sprat himself has been misinterpreted as being wholly anti-rhetorical when in fact he was merely arguing against inane rhetoric (‘Rewriting the Revolution: Milton, Bacon, and the Royal Society Rhetoricians’, in Cummins and Burchell, eds., Science, Literature and Rhetoric, 103).

⁹ Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book 1, Sect. 4.3 in The Collected Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. E. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1979) (repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996), 3, 120. All references to Bacon’s works refer to this edition.

¹⁰ Bacon, De Augmentis, Book 2, xvii.9 (vol. 3, 137).

¹¹ Robert Boyle, An Account of Philaretus During His Minority, in Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends, ed. Michael Hunter (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1994), 14.

¹² Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (1690), [A6^r]. Subsequent references are given in the text.

¹³ William Petty, ‘A Dialogue concerning shipping’, BL MS Add. 72893, ff. 8–26. Petty and the double-bottom were also the subject of a mock-heroic satire, ‘Laudem Navis Geminae’ (BL Sloane MS 360, ff. 73^r–80^r). See Vickers, ‘Royal Society’, 40.

¹⁴ Also bibulous, catalysis, emaciate, experimentist, funambule, lampoon, lymphatic, paradigmatic, perennial, reinvigorate, etc. Perhaps he could excuse logodædali as neo-Greek and therefore acceptable.

¹⁵ ‘A Review and a Conclusion’ (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 483–4). ‘The use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures in stead of words proper … in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches are not to be admitted’ (Leviathan, I.5.35). Hobbes wrote a Latin verse autobiography. On Hobbes and rhetoric, see David Burchell, ‘“A Plain Blunt Man”: Hobbes, Science, and Rhetoric Revisited’, in Cummings and Burchell, eds., Science, Literature and Rhetoric, 52–72.

¹⁶ Margaret Cavendish, ‘To the Natural Philosophers’, in Poems and Fancies (1664), [n.p.].

¹⁷ Sprat, History, 416; Robert Boyle, The Second Part of the Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus (1687), [A8^v]; and Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, Whereto is Premis’d a Discourse upon such kind of Thoughts (1665), [b2^v]. Subsequent references are given in the text.

¹⁸ On Wilkins’s Universal Character see Christie, ‘Introduction’, 6; Mary Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). And even so, a young protégé of Wilkins sent him his poems with a reference to, ‘the generall favour wch all Arts receiv from you’ (BL Add MS 18220, ‘To the Revd Dr Wilkins Warden of Wadham Coll in Oxford’, 118); Newton was the perhaps unwilling subject of a number of poems on astronomy and optics, most notably Edmund Halley’s Latin ode to Newton (Newton, Principia Mathematica [1687], [A4^r–v]); and Locke wrote highly polished familiar letters to Esther and Damaris Masham, whom he styled ‘Philoclea’ (see Susan Whyman, ‘The Correspondence of Esther Masham and John Locke: A Study in Epistolary Silences’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 66.3/4 [2003]: 275–305; and Sarah Dutton (Sarah Hutton, ‘Debating the Faith: Damaris Masham (1658–1702) and religious controversy’ in Anne Dunan-Page and Clotilde Prunier, eds., Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800 [New York: Springer, 2013]).

¹⁹ See Plato, Republic 607b.

²⁰ Brian Vickers, ‘Bacon among the Literati: Science and Language’, Comparative Criticism, 13 (1991): 249–72 (250).

²¹ Vickers, ‘Bacon among the Literati’, 251. See also John L. Harrison, ‘Bacon’s View of Rhetoric, Poetry, and the Imagination’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 20.2 (1957): 107–25; Jeffrey Gore, ‘Francis Bacon and the “Desserts of Poetry”’, Prose Studies, 29.3 (2007): 359–77; and Sean Patrick O’Rourke et al., ‘The Most Significant Passage on Rhetoric in the Works of Francis Bacon’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 26.3 (1996): 31–55.

²² Vickers, ‘Bacon among the Literati’, 252.

²³ Walter Rawley’s preface to Sylva apologizes for the ‘indigested Heap of Particulars [that] cannot have that lustre, which Bookes cast into Methods have’ (Sylva Sylvarum [1627], A1[^r]). Bacon’s distinction of rhetorical registers is discussed by James P. Zappen in O’Rourke et al., ‘The Most Significant Passage on Rhetoric’, 49–53.

²⁴ Parasceve I.403.

²⁵ De Augmentis III, 218. ‘There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge but by similitude.’

²⁶ Cowley, ‘To the Royal Society’, 40 (stanzas 2, 9, and 5).

²⁷ See Burchell, ‘“A Plain Blunt Man”’, 54. Brian Vickers notes (perhaps contentiously) that Bacon’s own habit of rhetorically symmetrical structures style is ‘pure English Ciceronian’ (Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968]), 117.

²⁸ Seneca, Epistulae Morales, XL (‘On the Proper Style for a Philosopher’s Discourse’, trans. Richard M. Gunmere [Seneca, 10 vols.] (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1917; repr. 1989), vol. 4, 264.

²⁹ David Burchell describes it as ‘stylistic terrorism … designed to upset the reader’s preconceptions and … complacency’ (‘“A Plain Blunt Man”’, 60). On Lipsius, see E. Catherine Dunn, ‘Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing’, Studies in the Renaissance, 3 (1956): 145–56.

³⁰ Stephen Clucas, ‘A Knowledge Broken’, in Neil Rhodes, ed., English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 171–2.

³¹ Gimelli Martin ‘Rewriting the Revolution’, 103.

³² On Bacon’s own generic range, see Deborah E. Harkness, ‘Francis Bacon’s Experimental Writing’, in Susannah Brietz Monta and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds., Teaching Early Modern English Prose (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010), 255.

³³ See, on all these, Reid Barbour, ‘Thomas Browne’s A Letter to a Friend and the Semiotics of Disease’, Renaissance Studies, 24.3 (2010): 403–19; Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Mary Ann Lund, ‘The Christian Physician: Thomas Browne and the Role of Religion in Medical Practice’, in Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd, eds., A Man Very Well Studyed: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 229–46.

³⁴ Walter Charleton, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. John Baptiste van Helmont (1649), c[1^r]–[c1^v].

³⁵ By ‘epic’, Browne means hexameter verse. These two works are now known to be by two different poets called ‘Oppianus’. All citations of Pseudodoxia Epidemica refer to the edition of Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

³⁶ Thomas Browne, Amico Opus Arduum Meditanti (‘To a Friend Intending a Difficult Work’), in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 4 vols., 2nd edn., ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), III, 150–5. See also Reid Barbour’s discussion of this manuscript fragment in Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 296–8.

³⁷ Barbour, Thomas Browne, 298–341; T. M. Westfall, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Revisions in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: A Study in the Development of his Mind’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1939).

³⁸ Pseudodoxia was translated into Dutch, German, and Danish in Browne’s lifetime, but Jan Gruter’s Latin version never appeared.

³⁹ Vickers, ‘Royal Society’, 36. In this essay Vickers oddly takes Browne to task for answering this very insufficiency with ‘hard words’ because he thinks that PE is meant to be purely literary, rather than scientific (33–4).

⁴⁰ Religio Medici, ‘To the Reader’ (Keynes I, 10).

⁴¹ Browne’s greater linguistic security in Pseudodoxia may be owing to advancing years and an established reputation; and partly to the nature of the work as a compendium of fact, rather than of personal opinions (as in Religio Medici).

⁴² It is not easy to accept Austin Warren’s identification of Browne’s various registers as high, middle, and low (‘The Style of Sir Thomas Browne’, Kenyon Review, 13 [1951]: 674–87).

⁴³ Barbour, Thomas Browne, 307.

⁴⁴ This same notification is made by Boyle in A Proemial Essay … touching Experimental Essays in Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 16. Subsequent references are given in the text.

⁴⁵ Kevin Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 11.

⁴⁶ Preston, Thomas Browne, 114–17.

⁴⁷ Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics, 11.

⁴⁸ Novum Organum, III.405.

⁴⁹ See Claire Preston, ‘In the Wilderness of Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne’s Cabinets of Curiosity’, in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000), 170–83.

⁵⁰ Compare the 1672 essay with the 1646 original for a sense of Browne’s relatively large-scale revisions.

⁵¹ New Experiments and Observations touching Cold (1683), B2[^r].

⁵² Philaretus, 10.

⁵³ Both in fact soubriquets for his nephew Richard Jones.

⁵⁴ See Claire Preston, Writing and Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (forthcoming 2014) on his letter to Lady Ranelagh, and Philaretus.

⁵⁵ On Bacon’s use of fable see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 73–134.

⁵⁶ Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 93.

⁵⁷ ‘Diurnall Observations, Thoughts, & Collections … April 25th 1647’, BP 44, f. 94; quoted in Lawrence W. Principe, ‘Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle’s Literary Style’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56.3 (1998): 377–97 (389). Greatness of Mind and Occasional Reflections also have further clear echoes of Sidney’s Defence (also quoted in Principe, ‘Virtuous Romance’).

⁵⁸ Philaretus, 11.

⁵⁹ Philaretus, [A8^v]. See the paragone of philosophers and poets in Sidney, Defence, 85–7.

⁶⁰ Principe, ‘Virtuous Romance’, 392; see also Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle: Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 42.

⁶¹ Sidney, Defence, 83.

⁶² Boyle’s development of the narrative experimental essay is discussed inter alia by Peter Dear, ‘Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century’, in Peter Dear, ed., The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 135–63.

⁶³ Matthew Morgan, ‘An Elegy on the Death of the Honorable Mr Robert Boyle’ (1692), 13.

⁶⁴ William Petty to RB, 15 April 1653, in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), I, 142.

⁶⁵ Robert Codrington, ‘In Honorem Viri Praeclarissimi … Roberti Boyle’ [1660], RS Boyle Papers MS 36, 42^v–43^r.

⁶⁶ Cited by Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Pepys’ Diary and the New Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965), 133. Butler’s pastiche of Boyle is ‘An Occasionall reflexion upon Dr Charlton’s feeling a Dog’s Pulse at Gresham-College by R. Boyle Esq.’, British Library Additional MS 18220, ff. 98–100 (‘Truly, Lindamor, I am of opinion, that a dog is much more proper for the Experiment than the vigorous & vicious Animal co[m]monly styled a Cat, for a Cat, you know is said to have nine lives, eight in reversion & one in possession’ (98–9). Swift, of course, took up the parodic cudgel against Boyle in ‘Meditation on a Broomstick’ (1703). Boyle’s prolixity was acknowledged even by his friends and admirers. See also the manuscript fragment ‘the Aspiring Naturlist’, a dialogue, for an example of Boyle in long-winded form (RS MS 9, ff. 43–4).

⁶⁷ Lawrence Principe has noted that the original draft of Seraphick Love (1648) is far more ‘literary’ in its exposition than was previously understood and shows clear signs of Boyle’s continental reading during this period (‘Virtuous Romance’, 379).

⁶⁸ Seraphick Love, [C1^v].

⁶⁹ Seraphick Love, 38.

⁷⁰ Seraphick Love, 59.

⁷¹ John T. Harwood reads this as an admission that the work is not yet polished, rather than a criticism of adornment in natural philosophical writing (The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], lviii).

⁷² Philaretus, 12.

⁷³ Vickers, ‘Bacon among the Literati’, 268.

⁷⁴ On the Baconian bent for the fragmentary, see Clucas (‘A Knowledge Broken’), who argues that Bacon’s use of aphorism was antithetical to that of Erasmian humanism’s totalizing sententiae in seeking to prompt the reader towards further investigation, rather than to allow readerly complacency.

⁷⁵ Sidney, Defence, 87.

⁷⁶ See Harwood, The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle (lviii) on Boyle’s many genres, especially in his early writings (1645–55).

⁷⁷ James Paradis, ‘Montaigne, Boyle, and the Essay of Experience’, in George Levine, ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 60.

⁷⁸ The Sceptical Chymist (1661), A6^r. Subsequent references are given in the text.

⁷⁹ Boyle has Themistus the Aristotelian insult the Paracelsians as ‘sooty Empiricks’ (i.e. not gentlemen, probably because they’re not Aristotelians). The Boylean Carneades has, as we know from his descriptions of laboratory trials, had sooty hands, too. There seems to be a subtle distinction between gentlemanly toil in the lab, which goes with gentlemanly scepticism and correct judgement, a lower order of the same toil in aid of a misconceived chemical theory, and a mistaken antagonism towards such toil in the form of prescriptive (and also misconceived) Aristotelianism (24).

⁸⁰ At certain points in the dialogue, Carneades is actually quoting Boyle verbatim.