rather of the civil war which arose while that parliament was sitting, than of the proceedings of the parliament itself. The work was imposed upon him in his capacity of secretary for the parliament, and was reluctantly undertaken. It gave great offence to the royalists, by whom both the author and his performance were loudly abused. Its composition is inelegant, but the candour displayed in it has been pronounced much greater than the royalists were willing to allow.

ever, considered to surpass its deserts. As a specimen, we extract the account given of

The Taking of Constantinople by the Turks.

A little before day, the Turks approached the walls and begun the assault, where shot and stones were delivered upon them from the walls as thick as hail, whereof little fell in vain, by reason of the multitude of the Turks, who, pressing fast unto the walls, could not see in the dark how to defend themselves, but were without number wounded or slain; but these

were of the common and worst soldiers, of whom the the first force of the defendants. Upon the first apTurkish king made no more reckoning than to abate pearance of the day, Mahomet gave the sign appointed for the general assault, whereupon the city was in a moment, and at one instant, on every side most furiously assaulted by the Turks; for Mahomet, the more to distress the defendants, and the better to see the forwardness of the soldiers, had before appointed which part of the city every colonel with his regiment should assail: which they valiantly performed, delivering their arrows and shot upon the defendants so thick, that the light of the day was therewith darkened; others in the meantime courageously mounting the scaling-ladders, and coming even to handy-strokes with the defendants upon the wall, where the foremost were for the most part violently borne forward by them which followed after. On the other side, the Christians with no less courage withstood the Turkish fury, beating them down again with great stones and weighty pieces of timber, and so overwhelmed them with shot, darts, and arrows, and other hurtful devices from above, that the Turks, dismayed with the terror thereof, were ready to retire.

Mahomet, seeing the great slaughter and discom fiture of his men, sent in fresh supplies of his janizaries and best men of war, whom he had for that purpose reserved as his last hope and refuge; by whose coming on his fainting soldiers were again encouraged, and the terrible assault begun afresh. At which time the barbarous king ceased not to use all possible means to maintain the assault; by name calling upon this and that captain, promising unto some whom he saw forward golden mountains, and unto others in whom he saw any sign of cowardice, threatening most terrible death; by which means the assault became most dreadful, death there raging in the midst of many thousands. And albeit that the Turks lay dead by hears upon the ground, yet other fresh men pressed on still in their places over their dead bodies, and with divers event either slew or were slain by their enemies.

In this so terrible a conflict, it chanced Justinianus the general to be wounded in the arm, who, losing much blood, cowardly withdrew himself from the place of his charge, not leaving any to supply his room, and so got into the city by the gate called Romana, which he had caused to be opened in the inner wall; pretending the cause of his departure to be for the binding up of his wound, but being, indeed, a man now altogether discouraged.

Among the minor historians of the time of Elizabeth appears SIR JOHN HAYWARD, who, in 1599, published The First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry IV., which he dedicated to the Earl of Essex. Some passages in it gave such offence to the queen, that she caused the author to be imprisoned. He was patronised by James I., however, and at the desire of Prince Henry composed Lives of the Three Norman Kings of England (1613). After his death, which happened in 1627, was published his Life and Reign of King Edward VI, with the Beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1630). He writes with considerable smoothness, but too dramatically, imitating Livy and other ancient his- The soldiers there present, dismayed with the detorians in the practice of putting speeches into the parture of their general, and sore charged by the mouths of the characters. RICHARD KNOLLES, janizaries, forsook their stations, and in haste fled to master of a free school at Sandwich, in Kent, where the same gate whereby Justinianus was entered; with he died in 1610, wrote a History of the Turks, which the sight whereof the other soldiers, dismayed, ran is praised by Dr Johnson in the 122d number of the thither by heaps also. But whilst they violently 'Rambler' as exhibiting all the excellences that nar- strive all together to get in at once, they so wedged ration can admit. His style,' says Johnson, though one another in the entrance of the gate, that few of somewhat obscured by time, and sometimes vitiated so great a multitude got in; in which so great a by false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear. press and confusion of minds, eight hundred persons Nothing could have sunk this author into obscurity were there by them that followed trodden under but the remoteness and barbarity of the people whose foot, or thrust to death. The emperor himself, for story he relates.' This account of the work is, how-safeguard of his life, flying with the rest in that

governors, clamours of creditors, and confessions of their sons) what might be expected from them, yet have held them in with strong hand, till they have desperately quit, or disgracefully forfeited, the places where they lived. Deprived of which, they might hope to avoid some misery, if their friends, who were so careful to bestow them in a college when they were young, would be so good as to provide a room for them in some hospital when they are old.

the young Earl of Devonshire, with whom he set off, three years later, on a tour through France, Italy, and Savoy. At Pisa he became intimate with Galileo the astronomer, and elsewhere held communication with other celebrated characters. After his return to England in 1637, he resided in the earl's family, at Chatsworth, in Derbyshire. He now devoted himself to study, in which, however, he was interrupted by the political contentions of the times. Being a zealous royalist, he found it necessary, in 1640, to retire to Paris, where he lived on terms of

intimacy with Descartes and other learned men, whom the patronage of Cardinal de Richelieu had at that time drawn together. While at Paris, he engaged in a controversy about the quadrature of the circle, and in 1647, he was appointed mathematical instructor to Charles, Prince of Wales, who then resided in the French capital. Previously to this time, he had commenced the publication of those works which he sent forth in succession, with the view of curbing the spirit of freedom in England, by showing the philosophical foundation of despotic monarchy. The first of them was originally printed in Latin at Paris, in 1642, under the title of Elementa Philosophica de Cive; when afterwards translated into Eng

[Commendation before Trial Injudicious.] The fashion of commending our friends' abilities before they come to trial, sometimes takes good effect with the common sort, who, building their belief on authority, strive to follow the conceit of their betters; but usually, amongst men of independent judgments, this bespeaking of opinion breeds a purpose of stricter examination, and if the report be answered, procures only a bare acknowledgment; whereas, if nothing be proclaimed or promised, they are perhaps content to signify their own skill in testifying another's desert: otherwise great wits, jealous of their credit, are ready to suppress worth in others, to the advancing of their own, and (if more ingenuous) no farther just than to forbear detraction; at the best, rather disposed to give praise upon their own accord, than to make pay-lish, it was entitled Philosophical Rudiments Concernment upon demand or challenge.

THOMAS HOBBES.

No literary man excited more attention in the middle of the seventeenth century, and none of that age has exercised a more wide and permanent influence on the philosophical opinions of succeeding generations, than THOMAS HOBBES, born at Malmesbury in 1588. His mother's alarm at the approach of the Spanish Armada is said to have hastened his birth,

Thomas Hobbes.

ing 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 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 the clergy. This led Charles to dissolve his connexion with the philosopher, who, according to Lord Clarendon, was compelled secretly to fly out of Paris, the justice having endeavoured to apprehend him, and soon after escaped into England, where he never received any disturbance.' He again took up his abode with the Devonshire family, and became intimate with Selden, Cowley, and Dr Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. In 1654 he published a short but admirably clear and comprehensive Letter upon Liberty and Necessity; where the doctrine of the self-determining power of the will is opposed with a subtlety and profundity unsurpassed in any subsequent writer on that much-agitated question. Indeed, he appears to have been the first who understood and expounded clearly the doctrine of philosobetween him and Bishop Bramhall of Londonderry took place. Here he fought with the skill of a master; but in a mathematical dispute with Dr Wallis, professor of geometry at Oxford, which lasted twenty years, he fairly went beyond his depth, and obtained no increase of reputation. The fact is, that Hobbes had not begun to study mathematics till the age of forty, and, like other late learners, greatly overestimated his knowledge. He supposed himself to

and was probably the cause of a constitutional timidity which possessed him through life. After study-phical necessity. On this subject, a long controversy ing for five years at Oxford, he travelled, in 1610, through France, Italy, and Germany, in the capacity of tutor to Lord Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, with whom, on returning to England, he continued to reside as his secretary. At this time he became intimate with Lord Bacon, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Ben Jons ›n. His pupil dying in 1628, Hobbes again visited Paris; but in 1631 he undertook to superintend the education of

tory of the Civil Wars from 1640 to 1660, was finished in 1679, but did not appear till after his death, an event which took place in December of that year, when he had attained the age of ninety-two.

Hobbes is described by Lord Clarendon as one for whom he had always had a great esteem, as a man who, besides his eminent parts of learning and knowledge, hath been always looked upon as a man of probity and a life free from scandal.' It was a saying of Charles II., in reference to the opposition which the doctrines of Hobbes met from the clergy, that he was a bear, against whom the church played their young dogs, in order to exercise them.' In his latter years he became morose and impatient of contradiction, both by reason of his growing infirmities, and from indulging too much in solitude, by which his natural arrogance and contempt for the opinions of other men were greatly increased. He at no time read extensively: Homer, Virgil, Thucydides, and Euclid, were his favourite authors; and he used to say, that, if he had read as much as other men, he should have been as ignorant as they.' Owing to the timidity of his disposition, he was continually apprehensive about his personal safety, insomuch that he could not endure to be left in an empty house. From the same motive, probably, it was, that, notwithstanding his notorious heterodoxy, he maintained an external adherence to the established church, and in his works sometimes assented to theological views which undoubtedly he did not hold. Though he has been stigmatised as an atheist, the charge is groundless, as may be inferred from what he says, in his Treatise on Human Nature,' concerning

[God.]

have discovered the quadrature of the circle, and dogmatically upheld his claim in the face of the clearest refutation. In this controversy, personal feeling, according to the custom of the time, appeared without disguise. Hobbes having published a sarcastic piece, entitled Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics in Oxford, Wallis retorted by administering, in 1656, Due Correction for Mr Hobbes, or School-Discipline for not Saying his Lessons Right. Here his language to the philosopher is in the following unceremonious strain:It seems, Mr Hobbes, that you have a mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too old to learn, though you have as much need as those that be younger, and yet will think much to be whipt. What moved you to say your lessons in 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 oysterwomen could not teach you to rail in Latin. Now you can, upon all occasion, or without occasion, give the titles of fool, beast, ass, dog, &c., which I take to be but barking; and they are no better than a man might have at Billingsgate for a box o' the ear. You tell us, "though the beasts that think our railing to be roaring, have for a time admired us, yet, now you have showed them our ears, they will be less affrighted." 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 one hundred pounds; but notwithstanding this and other marks of the royal favour, much odium continued to prevail against him and his doctrines. The Leviathan' and ' De Cive' were censured in parliament in 1666, and also drew forth many printed replies. Among the authors of these, the most distinguished was Lord Clarendon, who, in 1676, published A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr Hobbes's Book, entitled Leviathan. Two years previously, Hobbes had entered a new field of literature, by publishing a metrical version of four books of Homer's Odyssey, which was so well received, that, in 1675, he sent forth a translation of the remainder of that poem, and also of the whole Iliad. Here, according to Pope, Hobbes has given us a correct explanation of the sense in general; but for particulars and circumstances, he continually lops them, and often He sometimes omits whole similes and sentences, and is now and then guilty of mistakes, into which no writer of his learning could have fallen but through carelessness. His poetry, as well as Ogilby's, is too mean for criticism. Nevertheless, the work became so popular, that three large editions were required within less than ten years. Hobbes was more successful as a translator in prose than in poetry; his version of the Greek historian Thucydides (which had appeared in 1629, and was the first work that he pubfished) being still regarded as the best English translation of that author. Its faithfulness to the original is so great, that it frequently degenerates into servility. This work, he says, was undertaken by him from an honest desire of preventing, if pos-lity that the same may happen to us; for the evil sible, those disturbances in which he was apprehen- that happeneth to an innocent man may happen to sive that his country would be involved, by showing, every man. But when we see a man suffer for great in the history of the Peloponnesian war, the fatal crimes, which we cannot easily think will fall upon consequences of intestine troubles.' At Chatsworth, ourselves, the pity is the less. And therefore men are to which he retired in 1674 to spend the remainder apt to pity those whom they love; for whom they of his days, he continued to compose various works, love they think worthy of good, and therefore not the principal of which, entitled Behemoth, or a His-worthy of calamity. Thence it is also, that men pity

omits the most beautiful.

*

it followeth that we can have no conception or image Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, of the Deity; and, consequently, all his attributes signify our inability and defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, 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 somewhat before it, and that, again, by something else before that, till of all Powers, and first Cause of all Causes: and this we come to an eternal (that is to say, the first) Power is it which all men conceive by the name of GOD, implying eternity, incomprehensibility, and omnipotency. And thus all that will consider may know that God is, though not what he is even a man that is born blind, though it be not possible for him to have any imagination what kind of thing fire is, yet he cannot but know that something there is that men call fire, because it warmeth him.

[Pity and Indignation.]

Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity. But when it lighteth on such as we think have not deserved the same, the compassion is greater, because then there appeareth more probabi