Much more famous is the name of Thomas Hobbes, called the philosopher of Malmesbury, where, exactly a century before that Revolution to which his doctrines gave so much aid, he was prematurely born, in 1588, through the fright given his mother by the Spanish Armada, which was purposed, as Philip and the Pope well knew, to crush all such learning and independent thinking out of England and out of the world. As tutor to Lord Cavendish, Hobbes was, it is pleasant to think, intimate with Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In 1631 he undertook to superintend another nobleman's education, and visited Pisa, where he became intimate with Galileo the astronomer. In 1640 he returned to Paris, where he lived on friendly terms with Descartes; in 1647 he was appointed mathematical teacher to Charles, Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II., and after his death, in December, 1679, was published his "Behemoth, or a History of the Civil Wars from 1640 to 1660." He was very timid in disposition, evidently from the accident of his birth, and he therefore remained an adherent to the Church of England, but philosophically he was a Deist, although he has been called an Atheist. This, however, he was not; for he boldly says: "Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have no conception or image of the Deity, except only this, that there is a God. For the effects, we acknowledge naturally, do include a Power of their producing before they were produced; and that Power presupposeth something existent that hath such power; and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by something before it, and that again by something else

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before that, till we come to an Eternal (that is to say the First) Power of all power, and First Cause of all causes; and this it is which men conceive by the name of God, implying Eternity, Incomprehensibility, and Omnipotency." If any Atheist, if there be such, will carefully think over and weigh this, he will find that it says in part much the same as does the Athanasian Creed.

But it is not for his theology or his theological views that we should go to Hobbes. His great work is "The Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil," which was anticipated in some measure, and in point of time, by his "Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society," and which was followed, after an intimacy with Selden, Cowley, and Dr. Harvey, (for Hobbes seems to have been very fortunate in knowing really great men,) by his "Letter on Liberty and Necessity," in which he combated the doctrine of Free Will, and expounded that of a Philosophical Necessity. "Man, according to Hobbes," says a writer, "is represented as a selfish and ferocious animal, requiring the strong hand of despotism to keep him in check; and all notions of right and wrong are made to depend upon self-interest alone." This is not a noble view of the noblest animal; but it is precisely the same view that all religious writers take of Unregenerate Man; and it is rather amusing to see excellent bishops coming forward to defend man and to attack Hobbes. "He was a bear," said Charles II., who greatly admired his writings, "against which the Church played its young dogs in order to exercise them." But in spite of his harsh views of life, Hobbes led a peaceful existence,

reading little and thinking much. "If I had read as much as other men I should have been as ignorant as they," he was accustomed to say; but certainly he was well read in the best of the old authors. He is a deep thinker, a bold and courageous exponent of his own views; clear and concise in argument, and very quick to see his point. His great value is, that his chief work is a book for real thinkers, and gives fairly one view of the nature of man. He does not stoop to chronicle wars, marriages, and coronations of kings; he concerns himself, not with the nobility, but with the grander subject of Universal Man. He is a powerful and an admirable antagonist, and by his masterly and enduring discussions, has freed the human mind from many of the follies and errors repeated from age to age in the schools. His "language is so lucid and concise," says Hallam, "that it would almost be as improper to put an algebraical process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs." His treatises on Logic, Human Nature, and Government are still text books, and the influence of these works is manifest in the later speculations of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume and notwithstanding the subsequent labours of Hartley and Mill, the latter of whom admits that "the character of modern speculation is to a great degree determined by the writings of Hobbes," an intimate acquaintance with the ideas of the philosopher of Malmesbury is still indispensable for all who wish to acquire a mastery of metaphysical science.

HETHER England owes more to her thinkers than to her workers is a question that need scarcely be argued here: suffice it to say that her thinkers have ever been in advance of her workers, and have con

stantly suggested improvements, not only to their own country but to all countries. It would be difficult to point out in any land such a succession of truly great men, benefactors of their country, in the way of suggestive thought, as Great Britain has produced.

Of these, one of the greatest is John Locke, the son of a gentleman of Somersetshire, where the cottage in which he was born is still shown; a humble proof of how badly lodged the gentry must have been in 1632, and that the peasantry must have fared worse than at present our cows and pigs fare in the matter of lodging. Locke was educated at Westminster, and then at Christ-church, Oxford; and having chosen the profession of medicine, he made considerable progress in that science, until he found that the delicacy of his

health would prevent him from working at his necessary studies so hard as he wished. He therefore served Sir Henry Vane as secretary, travelled abroad, came again to Oxford, and was offered a preferment in the Church in Ireland, which, greatly to his credit, he declined. "A man's affairs, and the whole course of his life," said he, "are not to be altered in a moment; and one is not made fit for a calling, and that in a day. It is not enough for such places [those of clergymen] to be merely in orders; and I cannot think that preferment of that nature should be thrown on a man who has never given any proof of himself, and has not even tried the pulpit."

In 1666—for in a work like the present it is impossible to pursue the biography of any great man further than a few dates-Locke became acquainted with Lord Ashley, afterwards the Earl of Shaftesbury; and between the philosopher, then a mere medical friend, and the nobleman there sprang up a great intimacy. Locke was received into Shaftesbury's house and heart, and became thereby intimate with John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, Lord Halifax, and other wits of the time; for in those degenerate days noblemen condescended to know something, and to patronise art and letters. When Shaftesbury received his earldom (Locke had educated his son, and afterwards his grandson, the philosophic Shaftesbury) and became Chancellor, he gave Locke a post under Government, which the philosopher only enjoyed one year, losing his place when his patron fell. In 1675, Locke's health induced him to visit France; and he resided in Holland after the death of his patron, finding it safer to be out of the way of his political enemies, the