enia; James I, Morpheus. He referred to Hobbes as
Leviathan; and to Francis Bacon, as Verulamius. Oliver Cromwell he
renamed Olphaus Megaletor.

Harrington's book was seized while printing, and carried to Whitehall.
Harrington went to Cromwell's daughter, Lady Claypole, played with her
three-year-old child while waiting for her, and said to her, when she
came and found him with her little girl upon his lap, "Madam, you have
come in the nick of time, for I was just about to steal this pretty
lady." "Why should you?" "Why shouldn't I, unless you cause your father
to restore a child of mine that lie has stolen?" It was only, he said,
a kind of political romance; so far from any treason against her father
that he hoped she would let him know it was to be dedicated to him. So
the book was restored; and it was published in the time of Cromwell's
Commonwealth, in the year 1656.

This treatise, which had its origin in the most direct pressure of the
problem of government upon the minds of men continues the course of
thought on which Machiavelli's "Prince" had formed one famous station,
and Hobbes's "Leviathan," another.

"Oceana," when published, was widely read and actively attacked. One
opponent of its doctrines was Dr. Henry Ferne, afterward Bishop of
Chester. Another was Matthew Wren, eldest son to the Bishop of Ely.
He was one of those who met for scientific research at the house of Dr.
Wilkins, and had, said Harrington, "an excellent faculty of magnifying
a louse and diminishing a commonwealth."

In 1659, Harrington published an abridgment of his Oceana as "The Art of
Lawgiving," in three books. Other pieces followed, in which he
defended or developed his opinions. He again urged them when Cromwell's
Commonwealth was in its death-throes. Then he fell back upon argument
at nightly meetings of a Rota Club which met in the New Palace Yard,
Westminster. Milton's old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was one of its members;
and its elections were by ballot, with rotation in the tenure of all
offices. The club was put an end to at the Restoration, when Harrington
retired to his study and amused himself by putting his "System of
Politics" into the form of "Aphorisms."

On December 28, 1661, James Harrington, then fifty years old, was
arrested and carried to the Tower as a traitor. His Aphorisms were on
his desk, and as they also were to be carried off, he asked only that
they might first be stitched together in their proper order. Why