whose portraits must have struck many an observer, the one should date his personal advancement and the triumph of the cause to which he adhered, from the same event which brought dismissal, ruin, and humiliation to the other!

Locke's own account of the origin of the Essay is interesting. In the prefatory Epistle to the Reader, he says, "Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six friends, meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this discourse; which, having been thus begun by chance, was continued by intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement, where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.”

The order in which Locke's principal works appeared was as follows:-his first Letter on Toleration was published in Holland in 1688; the Essay on the Human Understanding appeared in 1689; the two Treatises on Government in 1690; the Thoughts upon Education in 1693; and the treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. Locke died unmarried at the house of

his friend, Sir Francis Masham, in Essex, in the year 1704.

Of the many remarkable works on political science, to which this agitated period gave birth, we shall have occasion to speak more particularly in the second part of this work. Speaking generally, these works represent the opinions of five parties: cavalier Tories, and philosophical Tories; Puritan Whigs, and constitutional Whigs; and philosophical Republicans. Sir Robert Filmer, author of the Patriarcha, in which the doctrine of "the right divine of kings to govern wrong" was pushed to its extreme, was the chief writer of the first party; Hobbes represented the second; Milton and Algernon Sydney the third; Locke the fourth; and Harrington the fifth. Milton's chief political treatises are, the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), and The ready and easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth (1660). Harrington's Oceana, the name by which he designates England, as his imagination painted her after being regenerated by republicanism, was published in 1656. The Protector's government at first refused to allow it to appear, but Cromwell, at the request of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, gave his consent to the publication, coupled, however, with the dry remark, that "what he had won by the sword he should not suffer himself to be scribbled out of."

Essay Writing:-Hall; Feltham; Browne.

The examples of Bacon and Burton were followed by several gifted men in this period, who preferred jotting down detached thoughts on a variety of subjects, making as it were "Guesses at Truth" in a variety of directions, to the labour of concentrating their faculties upon a single intellectual enterprise. Thus Bishop Hall wrote, in the early part of the century, Three Centuries of Meditations and

Vows, each century containing a hundred short essays or papers. Felltham's Resolves ("resolve," in the sense of "solution of a problem "), published in 1637, is a work of the same kind. The Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne*, the knight of Norwich, is also nothing but a medley of opinions, and strange or humorous notions, quaintly and sometimes eloquently expressed, upon religion, and many other matters besides.

Physical Science.

The present Royal Society, incorporated with a view to the promotion of physical science in 1662, arose out of some scientific meetings held at Oxford in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, the President of Wadham College. They soon had the honour of numbering among their fellows the great Newton, some of whose principal discoveries were first made known to the world in their Proceedings. Newton was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge; in the chapel of which society may be seen a noble statue of him by Roubillac, with the inscription, "Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit."

* Author also of Hydriotaphia and a Treatise on Vulgar Errors (1646).

CHAPTER V.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

WE will commence, as in the last period, with a brief summary of the political history.

The opening of the century beheld the firm establishment of the state of things brought in at the Revolution of 1688, by the passing of the Act of Settlement, limiting the succession to the crown to Sophia, wife of the elector of Hanover, and the heirs of her body, being Protestants. The various Protestant sects had just obtained toleration; the Catholics, on the other hand, lay under the full weight of a penal code, the oppressiveness of which had just been aggravated by the passing of the Act of 1700, the avowed object of which was, to cause the forfeiture of the estates of all Catholic proprietors who refused to abandon their faith. The only palliation that Mr. Hallam can find*, with reference to this measure, is, that it was very sparingly put in force; which must indeed have been the case, otherwise there could not well be a Catholic landholder in these countries at the present moment. The Catholics had, moreover, to pay double taxes, were excluded from all public employments, and were shut out from the Universities. Much the same system was being pursued at the same time by the government of Louis XIV. towards the Huguenots of France; but with this difference, that the despotic character of the French monarchy caused the laws to be executed in France with infinitely greater rigour and punctuality than was the case in England.

*Constitutional Hist., vol. iii. ch. v.

Upon the accession of Anne in 1702, a Tory ministry came into power for a short time. But its principal member the able and unprincipled Godolphin - passed over to the Whigs, and it was Whig policy which engaged the nation in the war of the Spanish succession. Marlborough, the great Whig general, was closely connected with Godolphin by marriage. Everyone has heard of the victories of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde. Through the intrigues of Mrs. Masham, a lady of the bed-chamber, who had obtained an ascendency over the feeble mind of the Queen, and partly in consequence of the odium which the ill-advised prosecution of Dr. Sacheverel for preaching high Toryism before Parliament, drew down upon them, the Whig ministry were dismissed in 1710. Their Tory successors, Harley, Earl of Oxford, and St. John Lord Bolingbroke, concluded the peace of Utrecht in 1713. But at the death of Anne in the following year the Tory ministers, who showed symptoms of favouring the claims of the Pretender (the son of James II.), were at once hurled from power, and the long period of Whig rule commenced, which only ended with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole, in 1742. This celebrated minister practically ruled the country for twenty-one years, from 1721 to 1742, during which period England, through him, preserved peace with foreign powers; and such wars as arose on the continent were shorter and less destructive than they would otherwise have been. But in 1741 the temper of the country had become so warlike that a peace policy was no longer practicable, and Walpole was forced to succumb. The administration which succeeded, in which the leading spirit was that fine scholar and highminded nobleman, Lord Carteret (afterwards Earl Granville), engaged in the Austrian succession war, on the side of Maria Theresa. England played no very distinguished part in this war, the success at Dettingen (1743) being more than counterbalanced by the reverse at Fontenoy