you _fool_! Your dislike of old age you have
also otherwise sufficiently signified, in venturing so fairly as you
have done to escape it. But that is no great matter to one that hath
so many marks upon him of much greater reproaches. By Mr. Hobbes's
calculation, that derives prudence from experience, and experience
from age, you are a very young man; but, by your own reckoning, you
are older already than Methuselah.

"During the late trouble, who made both Oliver and the people mad but
the preachers of your principles? But besides the wickedness, see the
folly of it. You thought to make them mad, but just to such a degree
as should serve your own turn; that is to say, mad, and yet just as
wise as yourselves. Were you not very imprudent to think to govern
madness?"--p. 15.

"The king was hunted as a partridge in the mountains, and though the
hounds have been hanged, yet the hunters were as guilty as they, and
deserved no less punishment. And the decypherers (Wallis had
decyphered the royal letters),[385] and all that blew the horn, are to
be reckoned among the hunters. Perhaps you would not have had the prey
killed, but rather have kept it tame. And yet who can tell? I have
read of few kings deprived of their power by their own subjects that
have lived any long time after it, for reasons that every man is able
to conjecture."

He closes with a very odd image of the most cynical contempt:--

"Mr. Hobbes has been always far from provoking any man, though, when
he is provoked, you find his pen as sharp as yours. All you have said
is error and railing; that is, _stinking wind_, such as a jade lets
fly when he is too hard girt upon a full belly. I have done. I have
considered you now, but will not again, whatsoever preferment any of
your friends shall procure you."

These were the pitched battles; but many skirmishes occasionally took
place. Hobbes was even driven to a _ruse de guerre_. When he found his
mathematical character in the utmost peril, there appeared a pamphlet,
entitled "Lux Mathematica, &c., or, Mathematical Light struck out from
the clashings between Dr. John Wallis, Professor of Geometry in the
celebrated University of Oxford (celeberrima Academia), and Thomas
Hobbes, of Malmesbury; augmented with many and shining rays of the
Author, R. R." 1672.

Here the victories of Hobbes are trumpeted forth, but the fact is,
that R. R. should have been T. H. It was Hobbes's own composition!
R. R. stood for _Roseti