ornaret (Contr. Milton, p, 237). Get thee behind me, Milton, thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty, but of pride, bitterness and falsehood' (II., 161).

Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson's memoir of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, after remaining in manuscript for more than a century, was published in 1806, and has since passed through many editions. As a record of the events of the Commonwealth period from the noblest Puritan standpoint-a record instinct with warm personal devotion and unaffected religious feeling-the book has a peculiar interest. It was in order that her children might know the character of their father that Mrs. Hutchinson compiled this memoir, and it has all the simple grace and unstudied vividness of a personal record, meant only for sympathetic readers. In the midst of intrigue, time-serving, and unscrupulous partisanship, the sterling integrity and deep religious sincerity of Colonel Hutchinson stand out conspicuous in his wife's narrative. No other book impresses on us to anything like the same degree the strength of Puritanism at its best, and the refining influence it exercised on the social relations of life. Called from civilian occupations at the outbreak of the Civil War, Colonel Hutchinson, as Governor of Nottingham Castle, played an important part in the struggle with the King, and was one of the judges who signed his death warrant. On Cromwell's usurpation of supreme power, he resigned all offices of state, and lived in retirement till the Restoration, when he was included in the Amnesty. He was, however, arrested three years later for supposed complicity in a plot against the government, and died in prison in the following year.

'He and all his excellences came from God, and flowed back into their own spring; there let us seek them, thither let us hasten after him; there having found him let us

cease to bewail among the dead that which was man, or rather was immortal. His soul conversed with God so much when he was here, that it rejoices him to be now eternally freed from interruption in that blessed exercise; his virtues were recorded in heaven's annals, and can never perish; by them he yet teaches us and all those to whose knowledge they shall arrive.'

It was because Puritanism produced such men as Colonel Hutchinson that it remained a vital force long after its short-lived political triumph had given place to the reaction of the Restoration.

behind me, of truth and LI., 161).

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CHAPTER XI.

HOBBES AND THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS.

THE age of Milton was an era of revolution in the world of science. The names of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Pascal abroad, of Bacon, Napier and Harvey in England, stand out conspicuous as the leaders of a new movement. Napier's little treatise on Logarithms-the beginning of a new age of mathematical development-appeared in 1614, and five years later Harvey made known to a sceptical profession his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Meanwhile, despite all prejudice and intolerance, the Copernican theory was revolutionizing astronomy, and Descartes was preparing himself to be the leader of a new philosophy. On every hand were the signs of change-the passing away of the old. Paris became a great centre of scientific research; while in London, Sir Thomas Gresham's newly established College formed a meeting place for the men of the new science. Out of these latter informal gatherings sprang, at the Restoration, the Royal Society, with the foundation of which the history of modern scientific development in England takes a definite commencement.

This new spirit colours the literature of the age in various ways. It shows itself in the broad tolerance-almost sceptical in its consciousness of fallibility-of Sir Thomas Browne, the ocult philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby, and the

cease to bew?

rather was peculations of Dr. Wilkins; while it gives a tone much wh later verse of Cowley, Waller and Dryden-all eternalbers of the Royal Society.

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his viut it is in Hobbes that speculative thought takes per Trongest hold of the new world of scientific discovery, and ies to mould it into a consistent philosophical system. It is perhaps somewhat too much to assert that Hobbes was 'the one English thinker of the first rank in the long period of two generations separating Bacon and Locke,' but he was certainly the one Englishman of letters of this period who attempted to make the whole range of philosophic thought his province to order the whole domain of human knowledge.'

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

Thomas Hobbes was born at Westport-now a part of Malmesbury—in the year of the Armada, and was brought up by his uncle. On leaving Oxford in 1608 he was appointed tutor to the son of the Earl of Devonshire, and maintained a close connexion with the Cavendish family during the rest of his life. In London, Hobbes enjoyed the friendship of Bacon, to whom he acted as secretary, Ben Jonson, and × most of the wits of the time, while foreign travels gave him the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Galileo, Mersenne, and other leaders of continental scientific thought. With the sole exception of a translation of Thucydides, undertaken in 1628 to show the evils of popular rule in view of the contest over the Petition of Right, Hobbes reached the age of fifty without having published anything. But about 1637, under the stimulus of a newly-acquired knowledge of higher mathematics, he deliberately set about the construction of a complete philosophical system, which was to be developed in three treatises De Corpore, on the fundamental physical and mathematical basis of the system; De Homine, on psycho

logy; and De Cive, on political philosophy. No other philosophic thinker set about so ambitious a task till Mr. Herbert Spenser, in our own day, endeavoured to apply the laws of evolution to the whole range of human development. An attempt that even now is often regarded as premature in relation to the basis on which it rests, was not less relatively premature at the time that Hobbes began his work. The empirical method was as yet in its infancy, and the distinction between Science and Philosophy was only dimly recognized. There was, in fact, very little material as yet for the philosopher to work on, and no systematic classification of such material as had been collected. The treatises did get themselves written,—but at long intervals and by no means on the scale, or with the completeness, that Hobbes had originally intended. De Cive was privately circulated in 1642, published in Latin in 1647, and translated into English three years later; the De Homine, or Treatise on Human Nature, was issued in 1650; and De Corpore was published in 1655, and translated next year. Before the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes had fled to Paris, where Cowley, Denham, and x other royalist exiles afterwards joined him. Ten years later, finding that the ecclesiastical views of the Leviathan were distasteful to the cavalier court he returned to London. Here he was allowed to remain undisturbed till the Restoration, when he succeeded in reconciling himself to the Court, and spent the last nineteen years of his life under the kindly protection of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire. During these years he was continually engaged in controversy over theological and mathematical questions growing out of his writings, A pamphlet war with Bishop Bramhall produced one important addition to Hobbes' works a letter on Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in which his views on Free-Will are most fully stated. His con