r's reasonings stand on quite another foundation
than the scriptural authorities deduced by Filmer. The result
therefore is, that Sir Robert had the trouble to confute the
very thing he afterwards had to establish!

[363] It may be curious to some of my readers to preserve that part of
Hobbes's Letter to Anthony Wood, in the rare tract of his
"Latin Life," in which, with great calmness, the philosopher
has painfully collated the odious interpolations. All that was
written in favour of the morals of Hobbes--of the esteem in
which foreigners held him--of the royal patronage, &c., were
maliciously erased. Hobbes thus notices the amendments of
Bishop Fell:--

"Nimirum ubi mihi tu ingenium attribuis _Sobrium_, ille,
deleto _Sobrio_, substituit _Acri_.

"Ubi tu scripseras _Libellum scripsit de Cive_,
interposuit ille inter _Libellum_ et _de Cive, rebus
permiscendis natum_, de _Cive_, quod ita manifeste falsum
est, &c.

"Quod, ubi tu de libro meo _Leviathan_ scripsisti, primo,
quod esset, _Vicinis gentibus notissimus_ interposuit
ille, _publico damno_. Ubi tu scripseras, _scripsit
librum_, interposuit ille _monstrosissimum_."

A noble confidence in his own genius and celebrity breaks out
in this Epistle to Wood. "In leaving out all that you have
said of my character and reputation, the dean has injured you,
but cannot injure me; for long since has my fame winged its
way to a station from which it can never descend." One is
surprised to find such a Miltonic spirit in the contracted
soul of Hobbes, who in his own system might have cynically
ridiculed the passion for fame, which, however, no man felt
more than himself. In his controversy with Bishop Bramhall
(whose book he was cautious not to answer till ten years after
it was published, and his adversary was no more, pretending he
had never heard of it till then!) he breaks out with the same
feeling:--"What my works are, he was no fit judge; but now he
has provoked me, I will say thus much of them, that neither
he, if he had lived, could--nor I, if I would, can--extinguish
the light which is set up in the world by the greatest part of
them."

It is cu