Arian opinions, and supports not only his peculiar views on the subject of divorce, but the lawfulness of polygamy. It is the duty of believers, he says, to join themselves, if possible, to a church duly constituted; yet such as cannot do this conveniently or with full satisfaction of conscience, are not to be considered as excluded from the blessing bestowed by God on the churches, Milton's prose style is lofty, clear, vigorous, expressive, and frequently adorned with profuse and glowing imagery. Like many other productions of the age, it is, however, deficient in simplicity and smoothness-qualities the absence of which is in some degree attributable to his fondness for the Latin idiom in the construction of his sentences. It is to be regretted,' says Lord Macaulay, 'that the prose writings of Milton should in our time be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has he ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."" The following extracts are taken respectively from The Reason of Church Government, Tractate of Education, and the Areopagitica. The first of them is peculiarly interesting, as an announcement of the poet's intention to attempt some great work. Milton's Literary Musings. and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end-that were a toilsome vanity; but to be an interpreter, and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, citizens throughout this island, in the mother dialect. Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above, of being a Christian, might do for mine; not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as my world; whose fortune hath hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics. Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse, to give any certain account of what the mind liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath and hardest attempting. Whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model; or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art, and use judgment, is no transgression, but an enriching of art. And, lastly, what king or knight before the Conquest might be chosen, in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero. And as Tasso gave to a prince of Italy his choice, whether he would command him to write of Godfrey's expedition Charlemagne against the Lombards; if to the instinct against the infidels, or Belisarius against the Goths, or of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our climate, or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, to present the like offer in our own ancient stories. Or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation. The Scripture also affords us a fine pastoral drama in the Song of Solomon, consisting of two persons, and a double chorus, as Origen rightly judges; and the Apocalypse of St John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies. And this my opinion, the grave authority of Paræus, commenting that book, is sufficient to confirm. Or if occasion shall lead, to imitate those magnific odes and hymns, wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most, and end faulty. But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets, beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear, over all the kinds of lyric poesy, to be incomparable. These abilities, wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet to somethough most abuse-in every nation: and are of power, besides the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility; to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and After I had, from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father (whom God recompense!), been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of my own choice in English, or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live. But much latelier, in the private academies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout-for the manner is, that every one must give some proof of his wit and reading there -met with acceptance above what was looked for; and other things which I had shifted, in scarcity of books and conveniences, to patch up among them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps, I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home; and not less to an inward prompting, which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined to the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written, to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die. These thoughts at once possessed me, and these other, that if I were certain to write as men buy leases, for three lives and down-states from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, ward, there ought no regard be sooner had than to God's whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue glory, by the honour and instruction of my country. amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would in all the changes of that which is called fortune from be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latins, without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's I applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed thoughts from within; all these things, with a solid and against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry | treatable smoothness, to paint out and describe; teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with such delight to those, especially of soft and delicious temper, who will not so much as look upon Truth herself, unless they see her elegantly dressed; that whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear now rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they would then appear to all men both easy and pleasant, though they were rugged and difficult indeed. And what a benefit would this be to our youth and gentry, may be soon guessed by what we know of the corruption and bane which they suck in daily from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant poetasters, who having scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem, the choice of such persons as they ought to introduce, and what is moral and decent to each one, do for the most part lay up vicious principles in sweet pills, to be swallowed down, and make the taste of virtuous documents harsh and sour. But because the spirit of man cannot demean itself lively in this body without some repeating intermission of labour and serious things, it were happy for the commonwealth if our magistrates, as in those famous governments of old, would take into their care not only the deciding of our contentious law cases and brawls, but the managing of our public sports and festival pastimes, that they might be, not such as were authorised awhile since, the provocations of drunkenness and lust, but such as may inure and harden our bodies, by martial exercises, to all warlike skill and performances; and may civilise, adorn, and make discreet our minds, by the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations, sweetened with eloquent and graceful enticements to the love and practice of justice, temperance, and fortitude; instructing and bettering the nation at all opportunities, that the call of wisdom and virtue may be heard everywhere, as Solomon saith: 'She crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets, in the top of high places, in the chief concourse, and in the openings of the gates.' Whether this may be not only in pulpits, but after another persuasive method, at set and solemn paneguries, in theatres, porches, or what other place or way may win most upon the people, to receive at once both recreation and instruction, let them in authority consult. The thing which I had to say, and those intentions which have lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything worth to my country, I return to crave excuse, that urgent reason hath plucked from me, by an abortive and fore-dated discovery. And the accomplishment of them lies not but in a power above man's to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend; and that the land had once enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelacy, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher-fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters; but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loath to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them. Although it nothing content me to have disclosed thus much beforehand, but that I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes; from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come into the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk, and there be fain to club quotations with men whose learning and belief lies in marginal stuffings; who when they have, like good sumpters, laid you down their horse-load of citations and fathers at your door, with a rhapsody of who and who were bishops here or there, you may take off their pack-saddles, their day's work is done, and episcopacy, as they think, stoutly vindicated. Let any gentle apprehension that can distinguish learned pains from unlearned drudgery, imagine what pleasure or profoundness can be in this, or what honour to deal against such adversaries. Education. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only. Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful: first, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year. And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind, is our time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to schools and universities; partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit; besides the ill habit which they get of wretched barbarising against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms, odious to be read, yet not to be avoided without a well-continued and judicious conversing among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste: whereas, if after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages, and whereby we may best hope to give account to God of our youth spent herein. And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy-and those be such as are most obvious to the sense they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics, so that they having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge; till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several ways, and hasten them, with the sway of friends, either to an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous divinity; some allured to the trade of law, grounding their purposes, not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees; others betake them to state affairs, with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding, that flattery and courtshifts, and tyrannous aphorisms, appear to them the highest points of wisdom; instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery; if, as I rather think, it be not feigned. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit, retire themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feasts and jollity; which, indeed, is the wisest and the safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are the errors, and these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at schools and universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearned. I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hillside, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious, indeed, at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefulest wits to that asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles which is commonly set before them, as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docile age. I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war. Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying 332 of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and sift essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. ... Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice, with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness : which was the reason why our sage and serious poet, Spenser-whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas-describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his Palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confir mation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? ... I lastly proceed, from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning and to learned men. It was a complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every least breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more equally churchrevenues, that then all learning would be for ever dashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy; nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If, therefore, ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew and false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end, but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind; then know, that so far to distrust the judgment and the honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure and indignity, to a free and knowing spirit, that can be put upon him. What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only scaped the ferulaz to come under the fescue of an Imprimatur?-if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument; for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth. For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, no stratagems, no licensings, to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power; give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps. without the cursory eyes of a temporising and extem- out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his porising licenser? He who is not trusted with his own reasons, as it were a battle ranged, scattered and defeated actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and stand-all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the ing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done, he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him; if in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing; and if he be not repulsed, or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title, to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer; it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning. And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these arguments of learned men's discour agement at this your order are mere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannises; when I have sat among their learned men-for that honour I had-and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance as shall never be forgotten by any revolu tion of time that this world hath to finish. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means. . . . This appeal of Milton was unsuccessful, and it was not till 1694 that England was set free from the censors of the press. The Reformation. When I recall to mind, at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge overshadowing train of error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the church; how the bright and blissful Reformation, by Divine power, strook through the black and settled night of ignorance and antichristian tyranny, methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears, and the sweet odour of the returning Gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrancy of heaven. Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners, where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it; the schools opened; divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues; the princes and cities trooping apace to the new-erected banner of salvation; the martyrs, with the unresistible might of weakness, shaking the powers of darkness, and scorning the fiery rage of the old red dragon.-Of Reformation in England. Truth. Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape, most glorious to look on ; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the god Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons! nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.-Areopagitica. Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do, injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her Expiration of the Roman Power in Britain. strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encoun- Thus expired this great empire of the Romans; first ter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing. in Britain, soon after in Italy itself; having borne chief He who hears what praying there is for light and clear sway in this island-though never thoroughly subdued, knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of or all at once in subjection-if we reckon from the coming other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of in of Julius to the taking of Rome by Alaric, in which Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. year Honorius wrote those letters of discharge into Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon Britain, the space of four hundred and sixty-two years. us, there be who envy and oppose, if it come not first in And with the empire fell also what before in this western at their casements. What a collusion is this, whenas we world was chiefly Roman-learning, valour, eloquence, are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, 'to seek history, civility, and even language itself-all these for wisdom as for hidden treasures,' early and late, that together, as it were with equal pace, diminishing and another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by decaying. Henceforth we are to steer by another sort statute! When a man hath been labouring the hardest of authors, near enough to the times they write, as in labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished | their own country, if that would serve, in time not much 333 belated, some of equal age, in expression barbarous; and to say how judicious, I suspend awhile. This we must expect; in civil matters to find them dubious relaters, and still to the best advantage of what they term Mother Church, meaning indeed themselves; in most other matters of religion blind, astonished, and strook with superstition as with a planet ; in one word, monks. Yet these guides, where can be had no better, must be followed; in gross it may be true enough; in circumstance each man, as his judgment gives him, may reserve his faith or bestow it.-History of England. THOMAS HOBBES. despotism to keep him in check; and all notions of right and wrong are made to depend upon views of self-interest alone. Of this latter doctrine, commonly known as the Selfish System of moral philosophy, Hobbes was indeed the great champion, both in the Leviathan and more particularly in his small Treatise on Human Nature, published in 1650. There appeared in the same year another work from his pen, entitled De Corpore Politico; or, Of the Body Politic. The freedom with which theological subjects were handled in the Leviathan, as well as the offensive political views there maintained, occasioned a great outcry against the author, particularly among No literary man excited more attention in the the clergy. This led Charles to dissolve his conmiddle of the seventeenth century, and none of nection with the philosopher, who, according to that age has exercised a more wide and permanent Lord Clarendon, was compelled secretly to fly influence on the philosophical opinions of succeed- out of Paris, the justice having endeavoured to ing generations, than THOMAS HOBBES, born at apprehend him, and soon after escaped into Malmesbury, April 5, 1588. His mother's alarm England, where he never received any disturbat the approach of the Spanish Armada is said to ance.' He again took up his abode with the have hastened his birth, and was probably the Devonshire family, and became intimate with cause of a constitutional timidity which possessed Selden, Cowley, and Dr Harvey, the discoverer of him through life. After studying for five years at the circulation of the blood. In 1654 he pubOxford, he travelled, in 1610, through France, lished a short but admirably clear and compreItaly, and Germany, in the capacity of tutor to hensive Letter upon Liberty and Necessity; where Lord Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, the doctrine of the self-determining power of the with whom, on returning to England, he continued will is opposed with a subtlety and profundity to reside as his secretary. At this time, he unsurpassed in any subsequent writer on that became intimate with Lord Bacon, Lord Herbert much agitated question. Indeed, he appears to of Cherbury, and Ben Jonson. His pupil dying have been the first who understood and expounded in 1628, Hobbes again visited Paris; but in 1631 clearly the doctrine of philosophical necessity. On he undertook to superintend the education of this subject, a long controversy between him and the young Earl of Devonshire, with whom he set Bishop Bramhall of Londonderry took place. Here off, three years later, on a tour through France, he fought with the skill of a master; but in a Italy, and Savoy. At Pisa, he became intimate mathematical dispute with Dr Wallis, professor of with Galileo the astronomer, and elsewhere held geometry at Oxford, which lasted twenty years, communication with other celebrated characters. he fairly went beyond his depth, and obtained no After his return to England in 1637, he resided in increase of reputation. The fact is, that Hobbes the earl's family, at. Chatsworth, in Derbyshire. had not begun to study mathematics till the age He now devoted himself to study, in which, how- of forty, and, like other late learners, greatly overever, he was interrupted by the political conten- estimated his knowledge. He supposed himself to tions of the times. Being a zealous royalist, he have discovered the quadrature of the circle, and found it necessary, in 1640, to retire to Paris, dogmatically upheld his claim in the face of the where he lived on terms of intimacy with Des- clearest refutation. In this controversy, personal cartes and other learned men, whom the patronage feeling, according to the custom of the time, of Cardinal de Richelieu had at that time drawn appeared without disguise. Hobbes having pubtogether. While at Paris, he engaged in a con- lished a sarcastic piece, entitled Six Lessons to the troversy about the quadrature of the circle; and Professors of Mathematics in Oxford, Wallis rein 1647, he was appointed mathematical instructor torted by administering, in 1656, Due Correction to Charles, Prince of Wales, who then resided in for Mr Hobbes, or School-discipline for not Saying the French capital. Previously to this time, he his Lessons Right. Here his language to the had commenced the publication of those works philosopher is in the following unceremonious which he sent forth in succession, with the view strain: 'It seems, Mr Hobbes, that you have a of curbing the spirit of freedom in England, by mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic shewing the philosophical foundation of despotic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too monarchy. The first of them was originally old to learn, though you have as much need as printed in Latin at Paris, in 1642, under the title those that be younger, and yet will think much to of Elementa Philosophica de Cive; when trans-be whipt. What moved you to say your lessons in lated into English, in 1650, it was entitled Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society. This treatise is regarded as the most exact account of the author's political system: it contains many profound views, but is disfigured by fundamental and dangerous errors. The principles maintained in it were more fully discussed in his larger work, published in 1651, under the title of Leviathan: or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. Man is here represented as a selfish and ferocious animal, requiring the strong hand of English, when the books against which you do chiefly intend them were written in Latin? Was it chiefly for the perfecting your natural rhetoric, whenever you thought it convenient to repair to Billingsgate? You found that the oyster-women could not teach you to rail in Latin,' &c. 'Sir, those persons needed not a sight of your ears, but could tell by the voice what kind of creature brayed in your books: you dared not have said this to their faces.' When Charles II. came to the throne, he conferred on Hobbes an annual pension of £100; but notwithstanding this and |