the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this discourse; which, having been thus begun by chance, was continued by intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.'

The order in which Locke's príncipal works appeared was as follows:-his first Letter on Toleration was published in Holland in 1688; the Essay on the Human Understanding appeared in 1689; the two Treatises on Government,' in 1690; the Thoughts upon Education in 1693; and the treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. Locke died unmarried at the house of his friend, Sir Francis Masham, in Essex, in the year 1704.

Of the many remarkable works on political science, to which this agitated period gave birth, we shall have occasion to speak more particularly in the second part of this work. Speaking generally, these works represent the opinions of five parties: cavalier Tories, and philosophical Tories; Puritan Whigs, and Constitutional Whigs; and philosophical Republicans. Sir Robert Filmer, author of the Patriarcha, in which the doctrine of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong' was pushed to its extreme, was the chief writer of the first party; Hobbes represented the second; Milton and Algernon Sidney the third; Locke the fourth; and Harrington the fifth. Milton's chief political treatises are, the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), and The ready and easy Way to

establish a free Commonwealth (1660). Harrington's Oceana, the name by which he designates England, as his imagination painted her after being regenerated by republicanism, was published in 1656. The Protector's government at first refused to allow it to appear, but Cromwell, at the request of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, gave his consent to the publication, coupled, however, with the dry remark, that 'what he had won by the sword he should not suffer himself to be scribbled out of.'

Essay Writing:-Hall, Feltham, Brown.

The examples of Bacon and Burton were followed by several gifted men in this period, who preferred jotting down detached thoughts on a variety of subjects, making, as it were, Guesses at Truth' in a variety of directions, to the labour of concentrating their faculties upon a single intellectual enterprise. Thus Bishop Hall wrote, in the early part of the century, Three Centuries of Meditations and Vows, each century containing a hundred short essays or papers. Feltham's Resolves (resolve,' in the sense of 'solution of a problem'), published in 1637, is a work of the same kind.

From the fierce semi-political Christianity of the Puritans, and the official historical Christianity of the Churchmen, it is refreshing to turn to the philosophical and genial system of faith confessed in the Religio Medici of the good Sir Thomas Browne. Browne was a mystic and an idealist; he loved to plunge into the abysses of some vast thought, such as the Divine wisdom or the Divine eternity, and pursue its mazes until he was forced to cry an ‘O altitudo!' and instead of being tempted to materialism by the necessary investigations of his professioninvestigations which he evidently pursued with keen zest and in perfect steadiness of judgment-he regarded all

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the secondary laws which he discovered, or beheld in operation, as illustrations of the regular government of the Power, whose personality, and disengaged freedom, and supremacy over the laws through which He ordinarily works, were to him antecedent truths of conscience and reason. The Religio Medici, which had already appeared in a surreptitious and unauthorised form, was first published by its author in 1643. In the first few pages, his tenderness and charity towards the Roman Church, and his genial and innate repugnance to the spirit of Puritanic bitterness, are made apparent. We have reformed from them,' he says, 'not against them.' His own temper, he admits, inclines him to the use of form and ceremonial in devotion. I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms superstition.' I could neverhear the Ave Mary bell without an elevation.' On the whole, he finds that no church squares unto his conscience' so well in every respect as the Church of England, whose Articles he thoroughly embraces, while following his own reason where she and the Scripture are silent. Though at present free, as he alleges, from the taint of any heretical opinion, he entertained in his youth various singular tenets, among which were, the death of the soul together with the body, until the resurrection of both at the day of judgment; the ultimate universal restoration of all men, as held by Origen; and the propriety of prayers for the dead. But he declares that there was never a time when he found it difficult to believe a doctrine merely because it transcended and confounded his reason. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.' He can answer all objections with the maxim of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est, and is glad that he did not live in the age of miracles, when faith would have been thrust upon him almost without any merit of his own. He collects (§§ 15-19) his divinity from two books-the Bible and

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Nature. Yet he is not disposed so to deem or speak of Nature as to veil behind her the immanence and necessary action of God in all her phenomena. Nature is the art of God.' Again, he will not, with the vulgar, ascribe any real power to chance or fortune; it is we that are blind, not fortune;' which is but another name for the settled and predetermined evolution of visible effects from causes the knowledge of which is inaccessible to us. He could himself (§ 21) produce a long list of difficulties and objections in the way of faith, many of which were never before started. But if these objections breed, at any time, doubts in his mind, he combats such misgivings, not in a martial posture, but on his knees.'

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From this description of the contents of the first few sections, the reader may form some notion of the peculiar and most original vein of thought which runs through the book. As the first part treats of faith, so the second gives the author's meditations on the virtue of charity. A delightful ironical humour breaks out occasionally, as in the advice which he gives to those who desire to be strengthened in their own opinions. When we desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.'

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The treatise on vulgar errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, is an amusing examination of a great number of popular customs and received explanations, which, after holding their ground for ages, during the long night of science and philosophy, were now breaking down on all sides under the attacks of the enfranchised intellect. The Garden of Cyrus is an abstruse dissertation on the wonderful virtue and significance of the quincuncial form. This is mere mysticism, and of no more value than the dreams of the Pythagoreans as to the virtue of particular numbers.

S

Physical Science.

The present Royal Society, incorporated with a view to the promotion of physical science in 1662, arose out of some scientific meetings held at Oxford in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, the President of Wadham College. They soon had the honour of numbering among their fellows the great Newton, some of whose principal discoveries were first made known to the world in their Proceedings. Newton was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge; in the chapel of which society may be seen a noble statue of him by Roubillac, with the inscription, 'Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit.'