. 435.]

More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the _Spectator_, on six
separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a
national glory. Defoe in his _Original Power of the People of England_
made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his
acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift
softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose
doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in
the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his _Original and
Institution of Civil Government_, not only dismisses Filmer in a first
part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second
section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal
the care with which the _Second Treatise_ had also been pillaged. Even
Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the
field he considered his own to call him, in that _Divine Legation_ which
he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor
of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory
is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this
self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English
Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps
a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the
_Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to
reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North
Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia
Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and
what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required
by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social
contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone
came to sum up the