to search for a wife for young Anthony Ashley; in 1671 he attended Lady Dorothy Ashley, and helped to bring into the world the child who became famous as the third Earl of Shaftesbury. In short, as the latter says, "all was thrown upon Mr. Locke," who was factotum to the family. All this time, however, although Locke was immersed in medical studies, he was not a qualified practitioner, nor did he ever proceed beyond Bachelor of Medicine. As Ashley rose to the highest offices in the state, Locke's responsibilities and emoluments increased; at one time the colony of Carolina was wholly under his charge (1670), and after Shaftesbury (as Ashley became in 1672) was made Lord High Chancellor of England, Locke administered his ecclesiastical patronage. But when Shaftesbury fell, Locke "shared with him in dangers, as before in honours and advantages," retaining, however, after the fall of his patron, the nominal post of Secretary to the Board of Trade, which Shaftesbury had secured for him in 1673. As, however, his salary was never paid, he was glad to resign this office in 1675. His health was now giving him

anxiety, and in November of that year he left England to settle at Montpellier, which he left for Paris in 1677. He travelled considerably in France, and did not return to England until 1679, when Shaftesbury was restored for a short time to power. During the events which led to Shaftesbury's indictment and flight, Locke lived "a very cunning and unintelligible life," but after his master's fall, settled quietly

In the autumn

in Oxford, and then retired to his family estate in Somersetshire. of 1683 he seems to have thought it necessary to escape to Holland, where he began to plan his essay on the Human Understanding. During his absence, he was expelled from his studentship at Christ Church College. He lived an obscure and inconvenient life, sometimes in considerable danger, until 1689, when he was able to return to England. In 1690 he published his Essay in folio form, and an English version of his Epistola de Tolerantia in 1689. He thus, at the age of nearly sixty, began his literary career, and now proceeded to publish abundantly. These early works, which attracted a great deal of controversial interest, were strictly anonymous. Locke settled at first in Westminster, where, however, his delicate chest suffered seriously from the fog (malignus fumus) of the town. The death of Shaftesbury had almost coincided with the formation of Locke's other great life-intimacy, that with Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, whom he had known before he left for Holland. He was in 1691 persuaded to make Oates, Sir Francis Masham's manor-house at High Laver, his home. Retreating to this quiet place, Locke devoted himself for the next five years with astonishing energy to literary work, but after this was drawn more and more into practical administration. He was a member of the Council of Trade from 1696 to 1700, and carried out many important reforms. After the latter year he

VOL. III.

retired from public life, and lived mainly at Oates, surrounded by a devoted affection and friendship, in active mental employment, and here he resisted as well as he could. his increasing weakness of body. He remained cheerful, but, as he said, "the dissolution of the cottage was not far off." On the 28th of October 1704, Locke died peacefully in the arms of Lady Masham, who had for so many years been like a daughter to him. He was buried in the churchyard of High Laver, under a sententious Latin epitaph composed by himself. His posthumous writings were collected in 1706. His work consists of a series of treatises on psychology, religion, education, government, and finance, each bearing a close relation to the others, and all in combination having exercised a remarkable influence on the progress and civilisation of Europe. It has been observed that, to give a just idea of the influence of Locke, it would be necessary to write the history of philosophy from his time to our own.

to see me at all jam jo yr most affure brand & humle ser aut little longer you would have schurned to late

Hocke

FROM THE "ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING." To those who are willing to get rid of this great hindrance of knowledge-for to such only I write to those who would shake off this great and dangerous impostor Prejudice, who dresses up falsehood in the likeness of truth, and so dexterously hoodwinks men's minds, as to keep them in the dark, with a belief that they are more in the light than any that do not see with their eyes, I shall offer this one mark whereby prejudice may be known. He that is strongly of any opinion, must suppose-unless he be self-condemned -that his persuasion is built upon good grounds, and that his assent is no greater than what the evidence of the truth he holds forces him to; and that they are arguments, and not inclinations or fancy, that make him so confident and positive in his tenets. Now if, after all his profession, he cannot bear any opposition to his opinion, if he cannot so much as give a patient hearing, much less examine and weigh the arguments on the other side, does he not plainly confess it is prejudice governs him? And it is not evidence of truth, but some lazy anticipation, some beloved presumption, that he desires to rest undisturbed in. For if what he holds be as he gives out, well fenced with evidence, and he sees it to be true, what need he fear to put it to the proof. If his opinion be settled upon a firm foundation, if the arguments that support it, and have obtained his assent, be clear, good, and convincing, why should he be shy to have it tried whether they be proof or not? He whose assent goes beyond his evidence, owes this excess of his adherence only to prejudice, and does, in effect, own it when he refuses to hear what is offered against it; declaring thereby, that it is not evidence he seeks, but the quiet enjoyment of the opinion he is fond of, with a forward condemnation of all that may stand in opposition to it, unheard and unexamined.

The "witty" Dr. Robert South (1634-1716) was the son of William South, South a wealthy London merchant, in

whose house in Hackney the future divine was born on the 4th of September 1634. That the boy was precocious and daring is shown from the anecdote that, on the day when Charles I. was executed, South, whose turn it was to read the Latin prayers in Westminster School, took occasion to pray for the king by name. He was a prime favourite with the formidable Dr. Busby, who sent him, an advanced scholar, to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1651. South entered into holy orders in 1658, being privately ordained by one of the deprived Bishops, and in 1660 he was elected Public Orator to his university. His promotion in the Church was steady and rapid. In 1676 he was sent on an embassage to Poland, where he saw much to gratify "his naturally curious and inquisitive temper." In 1678 South received the valuable rectory of Islip, where, and at Caversham, he resided, wealthy, much respected, and intellectually active,

for many years. In 1685 he refused an Irish archbishopric. He was so much excited

*

Thomas Burnet

He

by Monmouth's rebellion, that he threatened to change his black cassock for a buff coat, and take his share of the fighting. South was repeatedly offered deaneries and bishoprics, but refused to be disturbed in his three neighbouring haunts-Christ Church, Oxford, the rectory of Islip, and his paternal estate at Caversham. enjoyed the friendship of successive Earls of Clarendon, and later on that of the Earl of Arran. A few days before his death he carried the election of the latter for High Steward of Westminster by exhorting the prebendaries, from his bed, to vote "Heart and hand for my Lord Arran!" South died at Westminster, where he was a prebendary, in his eighty-fourth year, on the 8th of July 1716, and was buried with great solemnity in Westminster Abbey. He was as much dreaded as admired for his "unrestrained acrimony of temper and boundless severity of language, mixed with the lowest and falsest, as well as the truest wit." This was Tillotson's opinion, who was peculiarly opposed to South, but the judgment seems an accurate one. The rector of Islip is described as a man of smart and ready humour, who never spared his audience, who railed at his opponents and laughed at his friends, yet who was nevertheless no buffoon, but a man of genuine piety and scholarship. South's sermons were greatly enjoyed for a couple of generations and then neglected.

Thomas Burnet (1635 ?-1715) was of Scotch descent, but born at Croft in Yorkshire. He was educated at the free school of Northallerton, and proceeded in 1651 to Clair Hall, Cambridge, where Tillotson, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was his tutor. Burnet said that he owed to this famous man "that free, generous, noble way of thinking" which it was his pride to cultivate. When, in 1654, Cudworth moved over to Christ's College, Burnet went with him, and three years later was elected a fellow of that college. He published, in Latin, in 1680, and in English in 1684, his Telluris Theoria Sacra, which he completed with the De Conflagratione Mundi in both languages in 1689. In 1699 Addison addressed a Latin ode to Burnet, who, from 1685 to his death on the 27th of September 1715, was Master of the Charterhouse, and who steered that great school with courage and skill through perilous political waters. His Sacred Theory of the Earth is a progeological dream of the mode in which our globe rose out of the chaos of the

Deluge, which had so nearly wrecked it. But he may be allowed to state his thesis in his own words :

"The substance of the theory is this: that there was a primitive earth of another form than the present, and inhabited by mankind till the Deluge; that it had those properties and conditions that we have ascribed to it, namely, a perpetual equinox or spring, by reason of its right situation to the sun; was of an oval figure, and the exterior face of it smooth and uniform, without mountains or a sea. That in this earth stood Paradise ; the doctrine whereof cannot be understood, but upon supposition of this primitive earth, and its properties. Then that the disruption and fall of this earth into the abyss that lay under it, was that which made the Universal Deluge, and the destruction of the Old World; and that neither Noah's Flood, nor the present form of the Earth can be explained by any other method that is rational, nor by any other causes that are intelligible, at least, that have hitherto been proposed to the world."

Prose

We dwell, more or less lovingly, on these names of the precursors of à Popular modern prose, yet not one of them, not Halifax, not Tillotson, not Temple, survives as the author of any book now generally read by the larger public. Even the Prefaces of Dryden, it must regretfully be admitted, are no longer familiar to any but literary readers. The Restoration prose most effectively appreciated by the masses, and still alive on the shelves of the booksellers, is that of writers never recognised at all by the polite criticism of their own day. In a country bookshop you shall no longer happen upon the Sacred Theory of the Earth or upon Public Employment preferred to Solitude, but you shall upon Pepys' Diary and the Pilgrim's Progress and A Call to the Unconverted,

These works do not stand on the same or even on neighbouring levels of literary merit; but they have this in common, that neither Baxter nor Bunyan nor Pepys set any value on literature, or concerned himself at all with the form under which he transmitted his ideas. There was this difference, however, that while Bunyan was unconsciously a consummate artist.

Bunyan's Dream

and a man instinct with imagination, the other two impress us solely by the