the taxes, was able to procure his imprisonment for contempt of court[1]. Thus vexed by the wicked works of man, he refreshed himself by pondering the wonderful works of God. The result was a Latin metrical translation of the 104th psalm, copies of which he sent with long complaints to Southwell and to Pepys. But his native whimsicality soon reasserted itself. "Lord," he exclaims, "that a man fifty-four years old should, after thirty-six years discontinuance, return to the making of verses which boys of fifteen years old can correct: and then trouble Clerks of the Council and Secretaries of the Admiralty with them[2]."
The reappointment of Ormond in 1677 to the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, in the room of Essex, whose opinion of Petty was not high[3], brought about a lull in his dispute with the farmers, and after his recovery from the illness which had alarmed him in November of that year, there remained nothing to mar his pleasure in the prosperity of his affairs. He even began to think seriously of the possibility of exercising greater influence in public matters. About the time of his marriage he had been approached concerning a peerage. The condition then suggested was the payment of such a sum as, in view of his recent losses, Petty did not care to spend "in the market of ambition," and he thanked the royal emissary with scant courtesy[4]. In 1679, when Temple was planning to remodel the Irish Privy Council upon the same lines that he had followed in England and the protestant party at court had marked Petty for appointment to the reconstituted body[5], the offer of a peerage was again made to him. He seems in the mean time to have changed his opinion of "people who make use of titles and tools" and accordingly he made a journey to London, apparently with the intention of securing both the title and the seat at the
- ↑ See, in addition to Fitzmaurice, pp. 169—173, the extracts from Petty's letters in Thorpe's Cat. lib, MSS. bibl. Southwellianæ, no. 710; cf. Petty's opinion of the Chancellor and Sir Richard Cox's comment on it, p. 205, post.
- ↑ To Southwell, 3 April, 1677, Fitzmaurice, 172. Not all Petty's friends thought so meanly of his verses as he himself professed to do. In the privacy of his diary Evelyn wrote of Petty (22 March, 1675) "there is no better Latin poet living when he gives himself that diversion." See Bibliography, no. 9.
- ↑ "I am confident in all his Majestie's 3 Kingdomes, there lives not a more grating man than Sir William Petty" wrote Essex to Shaftesbury, 4 May, 1673. Essex Papers, i. 83.
- ↑ His letter is given by Fitzmaurice, p. 155.
- ↑ Carte, Ormond, ii. 494, 495.
