ny rebuffs; for pride will be proud,
and rich men require wisdom, when in their pay, to remember its place.
Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for,
Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound
translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the
side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with
Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of
half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with
honours by Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he
lost on Parnassus. His translation of Homer is tasteless and
contemptible. In mathematics, too, he was dismounted by Wallis and
others. Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he
dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would
burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says,
in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on
selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims
of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural
condition of man to be a state of war--a war of all men against all men;
might making right, and the conqueror trampling down all the rest. The
civil laws, he declares, are the only standards of good or evil. The
sovereign, he asserts, possesses absolute power, and is not bound by any
compact with the people (who pay him as their head servant). Nothing he
does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting
Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of
an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in
a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines,
which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered
and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also
vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the subject of the
well-known epigram,--

"I do not like thee, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,"

who rudely called Hobbes "_irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmsburiense
animal_." The philosopher of Fetter Lane, who was short-sighted enough
to deride the early efforts of the Royal Society, though they were
founded on the strict inductive Baconian theory, seems to have been a
vain man, loving parado