x rather than truth, and desirous of founding, at
all risks, a new school of philosophy. The Civil War had warped him;
solitary thinking had turned him into a cynical dogmatiser. He was timid
as Erasmus; and once confessed that if he was cast into a deep pit, and
the devil should put down his hot cloven foot, he would take hold of it
to draw himself out. This was not the metal that such men as Luther and
Latimer were made of; but it served for the Aristotle of Rochester and
Buckingham. A wit of the day proposed as Hobbes's epitaph the simple
words, "The philosopher's stone."

Hobbes's professed rule of health was to dedicate the morning to his
exercise and the afternoon to his studies. At his first rising,
therefore, he walked out and climbed any hill within his reach; or, if
the weather was not dry, he fatigued himself within doors by some
exercise or other, in order to perspire, recommending that practice upon
this opinion, that an old man had more moisture than heat, and therefore
by such motion heat was to be acquired and moisture expelled. After this
he took a comfortable breakfast, then went round the lodgings to wait
upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable
strangers, paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these
rounds till about twelve o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided
for him, which he ate always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after
dinner he retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve
pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to
smoking, thinking, and writing for several hours.

At a small coal-shed (just one of those black bins still to be seen at
the south-west end) in Fetter Lane, Dr. Johnson's friend, Levett, the
poor apothecary, met a woman of bad character, who duped him into
marriage. The whole story, Dr. Johnson used to say, was as marvellous as
any page of "The Arabian Nights." Lord Macaulay, in his highly-coloured
and somewhat exaggerated way, calls Levett "an old quack doctor, who
bled and dosed coal-heavers and hackney-coachmen, and received for fees
crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and a little copper."
Levett, however, was neither a quack nor a doctor, but an honest man and
an apothecary, and the list of his patients is entirely hypothetical.
This simple-hearted, benevolent man was persuaded by the proprietress of
the coal-shed that she had been defrauded of her birthright by her
kinsman, a