ou dared not have said this
to their faces."--He bitterly says of Hobbes, that "he is a
man who is always writing what was answered before he had
written."

[384] Dr. Campbell's art. on Hobbes, in "Biog. Brit." p. 2619.

[385] Found in the king's tent at Naseby, and which were written to
the queen on important political subjects, in a cypher of
which they only had the key. They were afterwards published in
a quarto pamphlet, and did much mischief to the royal
cause.--ED.

[386] The strange conclusions some mathematicians have deduced from
their principles concerning the _real quantity of matter_, and
the _reality of space_, have been noticed by Pope, in the
_Dunciad_:--

"Mad _Mathesis_ alone was unconfined,
Too mad for mere material chains to bind:
Now to _pure space_ lifts her ecstatic stare;
Now running round _the circle_, finds its _square_."
_Dunciad_, Book iv. ver. 31.

[387] When all animosities had ceased, after the death of Hobbes, I
find Dr. Wallis, in a very temperate letter to Tenison,
exposing the errors of Hobbes in mathematical studies; Wallis
acknowledges that philology had never entered into his
pursuits,--in this he had never designed to oppose his
superior genius: but it was Hobbes who had too often turned
his mathematical into a philological controversy. Wallis has
made a just observation on the nature of mathematical
truths:--"Hobbes's argumentations are destructive in one part
of what is said in another. This is more convincingly evident,
and more unpardonable, in mathematics than in other
discourses, which are things capable of cogent demonstration,
and so evident, that though a good mathematician may be
subject to commit an error, yet one who understands but little
of it cannot but see a fault when it is showed him."

Wallis was an eminent genius in scientific pursuits. His art
of decyphering letters was carried to amazing perfection; and
among other phenomena he discovered was that of teaching a
young man, born deaf and dumb, to speak plainly. He humorously
observes, in one of his letters:--"I am now employed upon
another work, as hard almost as to make Mr. Hobbes und