me his book (_which he would call
LEVIATHAN_) was then printing in England. He said, that he
knew when I read his book I would not like it, and mentioned
some of his conclusions: upon which I asked him, why he would
publish such doctrine: to which, after a discourse, _between
jest and earnest_, he said, _The truth is, I have a mind to go
home!_" Some philosophical systems have, probably, been raised
"between jest and earnest;" yet here was a text-book for the
despot, as it is usually accepted, deliberately given to the
world, for no other purpose than that the philosopher was
desirous of changing his lodgings at Paris for his old
apartments in London!

[353] The duplicity of the system is strikingly revealed by Burnet,
who tells of Hobbes, that "he put all the law in the will of
the _prince_ or the _people_; for he writ his book _at first_
in favour of _absolute monarchy_, but turned it afterwards to
gratify the _republican party_. These were his true
principles, though he had disguised them for deceiving unwary
readers." It is certain Hobbes became a suspected person among
the royalists. They were startled at the open extravagance of
some of his political paradoxes; such as his notion of the
necessity of extirpating all the _Greek_ and _Latin_ authors,
"by reading of which men from their childhood have gotten a
habit of licentious controuling the actions of their
sovereigns."--p. 111. But the doctrines of liberty were not
found only among the Greeks and Romans; the _Hebrews_ were
stern republicans; and liberty seems to have had a nobler
birth in the North among our German ancestors, than perhaps in
any other part of the globe. It is certain that the Puritans,
who warmed over the Bible more than the classic historians,
had their heads full of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea;
the hanging of the five kings of Joshua; and the fat king of
the Moabites, who in his summer-room received a present, and
then a dagger, from the left-handed Jewish Jacobin. Hobbes
curiously compares "The _tyrannophobia_, or fear of being
strongly governed," to the _hydrophobia_. "When a monarchy is
once bitten to the quick by those democratical writers, and,