Hobbist himself, and had his picture done by Cooper the miniature painter, which he kept in his closet. He also settled a pension of one hundred pounds a year upon his old tutor after the Restoration. During the controversy between Hobbes and his antagonists, mathematicians, politicians, and divines, Charles compared him to a bear, against whom they turned out dogs by way of sport and exercise.

The sceptical principles of Hobbes were very agreeable to that licentious court, and the witty but profligate Earl of Rochester complained on his death bed of the mischief which Hobbes's principles had done him and many others who were ruined by them.

Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, who had completely demonstrated Hobbes's ignorance as a geometrician, relates the following anecdote in a letter to Mr. afterwards archbishop, Tenison.

"Dr. Gerard Langbaine then provost of Queen's College, Oxon, a great friend of Mr. Selden's and a good man, who was with him in his sickness and at his death, wrote me a letter on the occasion containing divers serious things said by Mr. Selden to him in that sickness; and told me particularly that Mr. Hobbes coming to give Mr. Selden a visit, Mr. Selden would not admit him, but answered No Hobbes, no atheist; and of whom I hear that Mr. Hobbes's censure was that he [Mr. Selden] lived like a wise man and died like a fool."

Hobbes had such a conceit of his mathematicial learning that he pretended to have discovered the quadrature of the circle, and though his pretended demonstrations were all proved false by the ablest professors of that science in his time, he defended them with a most obstinate pertinacity and in the most scurrilous abuse of his opponents. Of this Dr. Wallis gives this account.

"Now when so many hundred paralogisms and false propositions have been shewed him in his mathematics by those who have written against him, and that so evidently that no one mathematician at home or abroad (no not those of his intimate friends) have been found to justify him in any one of them, which makes him somewhere say of himself Aut ego solus insanio aut solus non insanis; he hath been yet so stupid (to use his word) as to persist in them; particularly he hath first and last given us near twenty quadratures of the circle, of which some few, though false have been coincident (which therefore I repute for the same only differently disguised) but more than a dozen of them are such, as no two of them are consistent, and yet he would have them thought to be all true. Now either he thought so himself (and then you must take him to be a person of a very shallow capacity, and not such a man of reason as he would be thought to be) or else knowing them to be false was obstinately resolved (notwithstanding) to maintain them as true; and he must then be a person of

no

no faith or honesty. And if he argue at this rate in mathematics, what are we to expect in his other discourses ?"

At the invitation of his old pupil the Earl of Devonshire, he went to live in his family, and his residence at Chatsworth was rendered very comfortable to him. He was indulged in every thing he thought fit to do; and his regular rule was to dedicate the morning to his health, and the afternoon to his studies; therefore at his first rising 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 till he was in a sweat, recommending that practice upon his 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 breakfast, and then went round to wait upon the Earl, the Countess, the children and any considerable strangers that might be there. 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 went into his study, and had a candle with ten or twelve papers of tobacco laid by him; then shutting the door he fell a smoaking and thinking and writing for several hours,

After the fire of London when a bill against atheism and profaneness was talked of, Hobbes was at Chatsworth, where on hearing the news he

was terribly afraid that messengers were coming for him, that the earl his patron would deliver him up, that the two houses of parliament would send him to the ecclesiastical courts, which would pronounce him a heretick and hand him to the civil magistrates by a writ de Heretico comburendo.

He was very much afraid of death which he called "taking a leap in the dark :" Dr. Wallis relates the following anecdote of him, "Lady Ranelagh (or Mr. Boyle in her house, I have forgotten whether) told me divers years ago, that a great lady with whom she had lately been, told her of a discourse which had then lately happened between Mr. Hobbes and that great lady (I guess it was the old Countess of Devonshire, but am not certain.) He told her in commendation of life, that if he were master of all the world to dispose of, he would give it to live one day. She replied with wonder that a person of his knowlege who had so many friends to oblige or gratify, would not deny himself one day's content of living, if thereby he were able to gratify them with all the world." His answer was "What shall I be the better for that when I am dead? I say again, if I had all the world to dispose of, I would give it to live one day."

His extreme desire of living he manifested on many occasions. occasions. When he When he was near ninety years old he had a new frieze coat made, and 'to some person who said that it was a comfortable coat, he answered, "yes, it will last me

1

three

three years, and then I will have just such another."

He could not, however, escape the common lot of man; and it seems that at last he became reconciled to his fate, for when the surgeon told him that the ulcer in his bladder could not be cured, and the best to be expected was a little ease for the present, he said "then I shall be glad to find a hole to creep out of the world at." He died at Hardwicke in Derbyshire, December 4, 1679.

It was his ruling maxim to "suffer for no cause whatsoever," and he was wont to say, that "it was lawful to make use of evil instruments to do ourselves good," which opinion he thus illustrated "If I were cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his cloven foot, I would certainly lay hold of it to accomplish my deliverance."

In his disposition he was morose, supercilious, highly opinionated of himself, and impatient of contradiction, which, when he met with, it put him into a great passion.

This is the character given of him by Dr. Wallis, and it is confirmed by Wood, who relates that Hobbes frequently had disputes with Thomas White, a celebrated Romish priest and Cartesian philosopher, who is highly praised for his subtile genius by Sir Kenelm Digby.

"Hobbes had a great respect for White, and often visited him at his house in Westminster, but they seldom parted in cool blood: for they would