o us disguised by the arts of an
adversary--HOBBES'S noble defence of himself; of his own great
reputation; of his politics; and of his religion--a literary
stratagem of his--reluctantly gives up the contest, which lasted
twenty years.

The Mathematical War between HOBBES and the celebrated Dr. WALLIS is
now to be opened. A series of battles, the renewed campaigns of more
than twenty years, can be described by no term less eventful. Hobbes
himself considered it as a war, and it was a war of idle ambition, in
which he took too much delight. His "Amata Mathemata" became his
pride, his pleasure, and at length his shame. He attempted to maintain
his irruption into a province he ought never to have entered in
defiance, by "a new method;" but having invaded the powerful natives,
he seems to have almost repented the folly, and retires, leaving "the
unmanageable brutes" to themselves:

Ergo meam statuo non ultra perdere opellam
Indocile expectans discere posse pecus.

His language breathes war, while he sounds his retreat, and confesses
his repulse. The Algebraists had all declared against the Invader.

Wallisius contra pugnat; victusque videbar
Algebristarum Theiologumque scholis,
Et simul eductus Castris exercitus omnis
Pugnae securus Wallisianus ovat.

And,

Pugna placet vertor--
Bella mea audisti--&c.

So that we have sufficient authority to consider this Literary Quarrel
as a war, and a "Bellum Peloponnesiacum" too, for it lasted as long.
Political, literary, and even personal feelings were called in to heat
the temperate blood of two Mathematicians.

What means this tumult in a Vestal's veins?

Hobbes was one of the many victims who lost themselves in squaring the
circle, and doubling the cube. He applied, late in life, to
mathematical studies, not so much, he says, to learn the subtile
demonstrations of its figures, as to acquire those habits of close
reasoning, so useful in the discovery of new truths, to prove or to
refute. So justly he reasoned on mathematics; but so ill he practised
the science, that it made him the most unreasonable being imaginable,
for he resisted mathematical demonstration, itself![380]

His great and original character could not but prevail in everything
he undertook; and his egotism tempted him to raise a name in the world
of Science, as he had in that of Politics and Morals. With the ardour
of a young mathematician, he exclaimed, "_Eureka!_" "I