consequence of having been frequently handed about in MS., the Religio Medici appeared in a pirated edition, which led to its being published by the author in the course of the next year. Its success was overwhelming; "hardly ever was a book published in Britain that made more noise than the Religio Medici," says Oldys. It was translated into many languages, and as early as 1645 Patin tells us that it was in high credit in Paris; although it exposed Browne, among Catholics as well as Protestants, to a charge of atheism. Unmoved by the violent discussion which raged around this his first work, Browne devoted himself to an examination of popular errors in scientific ob

servation, which he exposed in 1646, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. His life was now perfectly uneventful, devoted to his profession and to his studies. He did not appear before the public again until 1658, when he issued together his Hydriotaphia and Garden of Cyrus, in which the delicacy of his mannered prose reaches its extreme height. Although Browne sided with the Royalists during the Civil War, he does not appear to have been disturbed. He was an original member of the Royal Society, was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1663, and was knighted by Charles II. when he visited Norwich in September 1671. Browne was a profound student of natural phenomena, and he continued his investigations far into old age, dying on his seventy-seventh birthday, October 19, 1682. Archbishop Tenison edited Browne's Miscellaneous Tracts in 1684; his Works in folio appeared in 1686; and his son-Dr. Edward Browne (1642-1710), one of the most eminent physicians of his day, and devoted to his father's fame-published his beautiful Letter to a Friend in 1690. The Christian Morals did not appear until 1716. Sir Thomas Browne was buried in the church of St. Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich. He "was of a moderate stature, of a brown complexion, and his hair of the same colour." In an age full of tragical vicissitudes, the career of Browne seems to have been uniformly fortunate. He was happy in a quiet and prosperous career, in a wife devoted to his interests, in ten children all remarkable for gifts and graces, in a reputation not less distinguished than that of any writer of his time. His modesty and sincerity made him a universal favourite; he had more friends in the world of letters and science than any other Englishman of his age; he corresponded with the learned world of Europe from Iceland to Naples. Sir Thomas Browne is one great example of the fact that it is not quite impossible for an illustrious author to be consistently humble, extremely beloved, and entirely happy.

Hobbes

FROM THE 66 PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA."

The Glow-worm.

Wondrous things are promised from the glow-worm; thereof perpetual lights are pretended, and waters said to be distilled which afford a lustre in the night; and this is asserted by Cardan, Albertus, Gaudentinus, Mizaldus, and many more. But hereto we cannot with reason assent; for the light made by this animal, depends upon a living spirit, and seems by some vital irradiation to be actuated into this lustre. For when they are dead, they shine not, nor always while they live, but are obscure, or light, according to the diffusion of this spirit, and the protrusion of their luminous parts, as observation will instruct us. For this flammeous light is not over all the body, but only visible on the inward side; in a small white part near the tail. When this is full and seemeth protruded there ariseth a flame of a circular figure, and emerald-green colour; which is more discernible in any dark place than by day; but when it falleth and seemeth contracted, the light disappeareth, and the colour of that part only remaineth. Now this light, as it appeareth and disappeareth in their life, so doth it go quite out at their death. As we have observed in some, which, preserved in fresh grass, have lived and shined eighteen days; but as they declined, their light grew languid, and at last went out with their lives.

FROM "CYRUS'S GARDEN."

But the quincunx of heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves. Beside, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and, though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose. Night, which pagan theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.

Though Somnus, in Homer, be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time when sleep itself must end, and, as some conjecture, all shall awake again?

A writer far less charming than Browne, and now completely obsolete for the ordinary reader, did serviceable work in clarifying and simplifying prose expression, and in preparing for the lucidity of the Restoration. THOMAS HOBBES was the most brilliant pure intelligence between Bacon and Locke; but his metaphysical system is now known to have been independent of the former, and derived from French sources. His views are embodied in his Leviathan, a work of formidable extent, not now often referred to except by students, but attractive still from the resolute simplicity of the writer's style. In the next age, and especially when deism began to develop, Hobbes exercised a great influence, but this declined when Locke gained the public ear. Hobbes, however, is still read by all serious students of philosophy, at home and abroad.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the son of a clergyman of Westport, in Wiltshire. His mother being terrified by news of the approach of the Spanish Armada, the future philosopher was prematurely born on the 5th of April 1583. He was at school at Westport and at Malmesbury, and proceeded to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, with a good basis of Greek, in 1603. Hobbes was protected by an uncle, an alderman of Malmesbury, who helped to pay for his education, and who, when he died, left him an annuity "that he might not be obliged to desert his studies." Hobbes remained at Oxford

until 1608, when he entered the service of Lord Hardwicke, afterwards first Earl of Devonshire, as tutor to his son William; he now remained in the family of the Cavendishes for twenty years, and, indeed, with short eclipses, for seventy years. In 1610 Hobbes accompanied William Cavendish on the Grand Tour. Very little is known of Hobbes for these early years, except that he was immersed in study, especially of Greek language and literature, and that he enjoyed the friendship of Bacon and of Ben Jonson. After

Thomas Hobbes

After an Engraving by Hollar

the death of the second Earl of Devonshire, in 1628, Hobbes transferred himself to the service of Sir Gervaise Clinton, with whose son he travelled as tutor until 1631. It was then proposed to him by the Countess of Devonshire, that he should return to her household, as tutor to her young son, the third Earl, to whom Hobbes had dedicated his earliest work, his translation of Thucydides. He now devoted himself to mathematics and natural philosophy; he visited, in company with the young Earl, many of the first men of science in France and Italy, and particularly enjoyed the company of Galileo at Pisa. In 1637. Hobbes and his youthful patron returned to England, and took up their residence at Chatsworth. Hobbes' Latin poem on The Wonders of the Peak probably belongs to the year 1638. In the general disturbance which followed the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes fled in the winter of 1640 to Paris, and became intimate with Descartes and Gassendi. In 1642, at the advanced age of fifty-four, Hobbes made his first important contribution to literature by printing, privately, in Latin, a fragment of his great philosophical work, De Cive, more completely published

in 1647. During his stay in Paris, from 1640 to 1651, Hobbes lived under the protection and in the service of another member of the Devonshire family, Sir Charles Cavendish. All these years he was digesting his system of philosophy, and at length, in 1651, he returned to London, carrying with him for publication his vast treatise, Leviathan; this attempted to prove that self-interest is the only settled principle of human conduct, and alone can lead to the wholesome conduct of a commonwealth. He had formulated the same doctrine, less fully, in a treatise of Human Nature in 1650. The English clergy are said to have raised such a disturbance about this book, which was held to be subversive of religion, that Hobbes had to retire suddenly to his old patron at Chatsworth, which, with other country seats of the Earls of Devonshire, remained his headquarters for the remainder of his long life. He engaged in constant controversy on philosophical questions, being repeatedly accused of heresy and even of atheism, charges which in 1666 were actually brought before the notice of Parliament; the storm, however, blew over. After this, in spite of his heterodoxy, the celebrity of Hobbes became European; in 1668 he brought out a splendid collected edition of his Latin works in Amsterdam; and he was visited in 1669 by Cosimo de Medicis, Duke of Tuscany. His English opponents continued to attack what one of them gracefully calls "that most vain and waspish animal

Δεύτερα φροντίδες σοφώτερα.
Thomas Hobbes of Malmelby

Title-page of Thomas Hobbes' " De Cive," First Complete
English Edition, 1647, with the Author's Portrait

of Malmesbury," but Hobbes was undisturbed. When he had passed the age of eighty, he undertook to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse, a feat which he completed at the age of eighty-seven. His Behemoth, a history of the Civil War, which he had written and suppressed twelve years earlier, he published in 1679, and in the same year he issued his autobiography. The astounding old man, who was not well, insisted on not being left behind when his patron moved from Chatsworth to Hardwicke in the autumn of 1679. The journey, although he was carried on a