Book I, proposition 47. "Begad," said Hobbes, "this is impossible!

He pursued his studies, found out that it was possible, and became convinced that it is also possible to square the circle. Easy as it seems, this feat has never been accomplished with pedantic accuracy, and Hobbes, from about 60 to 80, was engaged in controversy on the subject.

Oxford mathematicians, annoyed by his attacks on the University, replied with scientific precision, and such banter as mathematicians enjoy when they would be merry among themselves. In this long war, Hobbes was mercilessly handled, partly by way of discrediting his ideas in politics and religion. He had laid out for himself a system of the Universe, "Of the Body," "Of the Man," "Of the Citizen". In the political storm and stress of the Great Rebellion he wrote, in Latin, his book of "The Citizen," "De Cive," much of which he had already done, with other such work, in English.

These papers had been circulated; Hobbes thought himself in danger--it was "time for him to go," and in 1640 he fled to Paris. He hated Puritans without loving Bishops. In 1642 he published "De Cive"; he then turned to philosophy, and next worked at his great work on the relations of rulers and ruled, and on religion, called "Leviathan". In 1646-1647 he tutored Charles, Prince of Wales, in Jersey, and Charles always liked him as a witty companion.

In 1647, believing himself to be on the point of death, he behaved in an orthodox manner. To the witness, Dr. Cosin, later Bishop of Durham, he always referred when his orthodoxy was doubted. When Charles I had been slain, in 1649, Hobbes, who in 1650 had published his "Human Nature," the briefest Statement of his general view of mankind, thought of returning home, for now a Government, that of Cromwell, was firmly seated, and Hobbes's main political principle was "settled government".

By 1651 he had "Leviathan" fairly written out as a present for Charles II in Paris. But the King's advisers thought it a most unholy book (not that Charles himself cared, or had a bad opinion of Hobbes); he was rebuffed; he was afraid of being murdered for his religion (which, says De Quincey, "is a high joke; Tom Hobbes afraid of suffering for his religion!") and he fled back to England.

Hobbes, by 1655, had published his "De Corpore," and with that and "Leviathan," his most popular work, his philosophy of the Universe was before the public. He gives his natural history of religion, as (saving Christianity), the result of curiosity about First Causes, belief in ghosts (of which he is said to have been afraid), of superstitions about luck, and of priestly imposture designed to keep men in order. In politics he believes in an imaginary state of Nature, or anarchy, from which men, who are naturally equals, sought shelter in a contract, never to be broken, with a sovereign power, in fact with the State, though Hobbes prefers a single despot. The sovereign is supreme in religion as well as in secular matters, and Hobbes hates nothing more than the so-called "Kingdom of Christ" of the Presbyterian preachers, which really, he says, means their own domination. Hobbes's general doctrine, with its reservations and subterfuges, cannot be discussed here: it made enemies for him in every camp, religious and political, and now his unlucky mathematics were fallen upon, while he had an endless controversy with Bishop Bramhall on the Freedom of the Will.

At the Restoration Charles II renewed his friendly intercourse with his old tutor, granting, him a pension, when Hobbes could get it paid. In 1666 he was threatened with a persecution for heresy, and went to church, but did not wait for the sermon.

His "Behemoth," a history of the Civil War, was suppressed by the King, and was posthumously published. He translated the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into very poor verse; he wrote his autobiography in Latin verse, and was still writing in 1679 when he died on 4 December.

The style of Hobbes is lucid and succinct, without added ornaments. He had a clear idea of what he wanted to say, though inconsistencies appear as his mood varied, or as his argument led him into difficult places. His ideas provoked many replies which pervade English literature for long after his death; but such exercises in psychology and metaphysics belong rather to the history of philosophy than of literature. The doctrine of Hobbes is not optimistic. "When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is War, which provideth for every man, by victory or death." The idea is that expressed in a Greek poem "the Cypria," of about 750 B.C. Hobbes thought himself an authority on Epic poetry, among other things, and especially commended, in Davenant's "Gondibert," the really pleasing passage which describes the birth of love in the heart of Bertha. Hobbes expanded his ideas about the Epic in his translation of Homer. We do not know what he thought of "Paradise Lost".

Izaak Walton.

Born near Stafford in 1593, Izaak Walton went to London, lived in Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane, and was in business as an ironmonger. Donne the poet was then vicar of the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan's; Walton and he became friends: Walton was also intimate with Hales of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop King, and Ben Jonson. In 1640 Walton's brief life of Donne, already quoted, was published. In 1651 Walton had the dangerous task of carrying secretly to a Royalist in London the smaller George jewel of Charles II, after the King's crushing defeat at Worcester, on 3 September. A Royalist and a sound Churchman (his wives were of the families of Cranmer and Ken), Walton's natural cheerfulness, his sincere religion, and his habit of angling "with N. and R. Roe," were needed to keep him from melancholy in the evil days of 1642-1660. But he, for a writer of his age, is strangely free from the melancholy then in fashion, and his "Compleat Angler," first published in 1653, might have been composed in days of idyllic peace. This famous work is too well known to need description or praise. The natural history is as fantastic as that of Euphues, the instructions on angling come from a mere fisher with bait, but the beauty of the style, the sweetness of the thought, keep the book fresh as with lavender and rosemary. To later editions Charles Cotton and Colonel Venables added practical instruction on fly fishing, up stream, in clear water like Cotton's own Dove in Derbyshire. The brief biographies by Walton of Donne, Wotton, Herbert, Hooker, and Sanderson are little masterpieces in their manner.

Walton lived in old age at Farnham with Bishop Morley and then at Winchester where he doubtless fished with worm in the pellucid streams of the Itchen. Walton's connexion with a pastoral poem "Thealma and Clearchus," is of doubtful nature. Was he author, or did he edit the work of Chalkhill? He died at the age of 90, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Byron is almost the only critic who has thrown a stone at the kind memory of Izaak Walton, to which Wordsworth devoted a sonnet.

John Bunyan.

The two writers of this period whose works now come most closely home "to men's bosoms and business" are John Bunyan and Izaak Walton. Copies of the little plain volumes clad in sheepskin which they published at a shilling or eighteen-pence, fetch spurns like £1000, more or less, when they come into the market. The masterpieces of both are constantly being republished, and though perhaps few people have a fairly good knowledge of the contents of "The Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Compleat Angler," yet most people have had these works in their hands.

The popularity of Bunyan, the non-resisting ever-preaching Dissenter; and of Walton, the angling Churchman, rests to a great extent on their characters. Differing as they did about the right of Bishops to exist, and about Justification by Faith, could the two men have met, and kept off these topics, they would "have had good talk". Each had abundant humour, each was a keen observer of Nature and of human nature, each was a lover of peace, each had a modest little fount of poetry within him. Of each it may be said, as of Scott, "he is such a friendly writer," and each is plain and intelligible, Bunyan had no artifices of style, though Walton sometimes, by study, is able to rival the harmonies of Sip Thomas Browne.

Bunyan, who came of a very old landed family which had steadily lost all its lands to the last acre, was born in a cottage at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. He was taught reading and writing; and pursued his father's trade--that recommended by Mr. Dick for David Copperfield,--he was a brasier, or tinker, but not a wandering tinker. In early youth he was a leader in sports and games; you would have said "he wasna the stuff they made Whigs o'". Far from that, a native genius for expression first declared itself in his being "the ungodliest fellow for swearing"--which was not recognized as a literary exercise. He was under arms, like other lads of his age, but we have no reason to suppose that he was ever under fire, and his militia (Parliamentary, probably) was soon disbanded.

In his "Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners" (1666) he writes his religious autobiography; a work composed in prison, to which he was consigned because he would not cease to be instant in preaching. "The Philistines understand me not," he says in his Preface. He writes for lowly devotees, "Have you forgot the Close, the Milk House, the Stable, the Barn, and the like where God did visit your souls,"--with "terrors of conscience and fears of Death and Hell?" Even in his joyous youth, Bunyan had dreamed of "devils and wicked spirits," which probably did not trouble Shakespeare or Walton. At 9 years old he suffered from the nightmares that haunted R. L. Stevenson. His book is the most vivid description possible of the life of an imaginative lad, standing between gross pleasures and terrors of hell. A Voice and an Appearance came to him while playing at a kind of rudimentary cricket: he went on playing, but fell into religious hypochondria. The vividness of his imagination conjured up such scenery as he uses in his great Allegory: he beheld comforting words "that seemed to be writ in _great_ letters," and so at last found consolation in faith.

Thus, and in his conflicts against the magistrates, he acted and suffered, in his youth, all the adventures of his own Christian and Faithful, in "The Pilgrim's Progress" (published in 1678). He left an unfading picture of some elements in English society: seventy years later he might have been a Fielding. "He was a born novelist," it has been said: but the novels of his day were the interminable romances of the French type of Scudéry. His "Grace Abounding" is as brilliant in its way as the "Confessions of Saint Augustine". His secular characters in "The Pilgrim's Progress" are as good, by way of sketches, as are the finished portraits in "Tom Jones".

In 1680 he published "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman"; in which Mr. Wiseman gives convincing reasons for his opinion "that Mr. Badman has gone to Hell". Mr. Badman, in life's gay morn, like St. Augustine, had "great pleasure in robbing orchards and gardens". "The beginning of the Lord's Day was, to Mr. Badman, as if he was going to prison." As for his eloquence he was "a _Damme_ Blade". In literature his taste was all for "beastly Romances". In church he either slept or flirted, like Mr. Pepys. In the long run, Mr. Badman departed from his prodigal life, "quietly, peaceably, and like a lamb". It cannot be said of Mr. Badman that he had no redeeming vices; he was ill-tempered and envious; he occasionally went on the High Toby lay, and his masterpiece was a fraudulent bankruptcy. Mr. Badman is amusing, but his history, interwoven with many strong and simple anecdotes of other ruffians, cannot be compared in merit with "The Pilgrim's Progress," where the characters are so many and various; the imagination so vivid, many passages so rich in poetic qualities, and the language so simple. It is a great prose epic, a great novel of the road; and beside it "The Holy War" is tame and indistinct.

Bunyan wrote many works, now forgotten, on religious themes, and in controversial style his weapon was the cudgel. In his later days he was the most popular of Dissenting preachers. He died just before "King James was walked out of his kingdom," in 1688. If critics sneered at Bunyan throughout the nineteenth century, Dr. Johnson, at least, heartily appreciated the genius of the Non-conformist brasier.

With Bunyan-the student of the religious ferment of England in his age may well read the "Journal" of the founder of the Society of Friends, Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691). Like Bunyan, Fox was an untrained thinker and author; like Bunyan he was persecuted: he had not the genius, but he had the art of Bunyan in drawing "with his eye on the object".

Clarendon.

Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) of a Cheshire family, was educated at Magdalen Hall, in Oxford, and proceeded to the Middle Temple. He inherited his family's property, was distinguished for his legal knowledge, sat in Parliament when the strife between the King and the Parliament began, and took part in preparing the indictment against the great Strafford. None the less, when a general attack was made on the order of Bishops, he came over to the King's party, in 1641; and in 1646 accompanied the young Prince of Wales in his flights and wanderings, in March, to the Scilly Isles (where he began his History), and presently to Jersey. He remained with Charles II after the death of Charles I, and, if he and Montrose had been heard, the young King would never have disgraced himself by signing the Covenant; and consequently his Cause would never have been defeated at Dunbar, nor his very life imperilled after Worcester fight.

Clarendon, seven years after the Restoration, was banished by the influence of faction, as Thucydides was exiled at an early period of the war which he chronicles. It is not conceivable that histories written in such circumstances should be free from partisanship and bias: in fact no historians are exempt from prejudice.

Clarendon's history was, in the making, somewhat of a patchwork. What he wrote far away from books and papers, in 1646-1648, depends much on his memory: the book improves when he obtains contemporary narratives and letters. In exile, in 1668-1670 he wrote a Life of himself, which he later interwove with his "History of the Rebellion". Clarendon's heirs did not permit the publication of his History till 1704, from regard to the feelings of the descendants of the King's opponents. The book, in one respect, resembles the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Much of it was written during the actual course of the events by one who bore a great part in them.

Whether in favour or in exile, Clarendon was too loyal to say all that he knew and thought about Charles I and Charles II. But when we look at his pages "touching the Scottish Canons," which preceded the despotic introduction of the Liturgy, the cause of "the Bishops' wars" (1639), we perceive, the fairness of Clarendon. He makes it perfectly clear that these Canons could only be accepted by a people inclined tamely to endure the worst excesses of tyranny. But, on Scottish affairs, Clarendon is not always trustworthy; for example he dislocates the dates as to the General Assembly of 1638, permitted (though he does not say so) by the King, and the subscribing of the Covenant, which he places _after_ the Assembly. Mr. Gardiner, a fair historian, speaks of Clarendon's "usual habit of blundering". In his remarks on the Catholics, too, under Charles I, Clarendon can scarcely be acquitted of unfairness; considering how bitterly, in Scotland at least, they were persecuted under Charles I, and how loyally they stood by him.

However, a historical examination of Clarendon's great work is not here in place. The occasional defect of his style is the enormous bulk of some of his sentences. Two occupy two large pages and each contains some 400 words. Here are structureless agglutinations of parentheses: with the promising word "lastly" left stranded far from the conclusion. But such examples are not very common, and Clarendon describes action and intrigue with lucidity, and especially excels in his set pieces, delineations of characters, for example of Cromwell[1] and Argyll. His "characters" may not be exact, of course, but his knowledge of secret motives was extensive, and such knowledge, if not always accurate, is ever entertaining. All histories, as sources of knowledge, are sure to be superseded by the discoverer of new information. But the History of Clarendon can never cease to be of the highest interest, moral, political, and personal. He possessed, in his own words, "the genius, spirit, and soul of an historian," combined with knowledge of great affairs, important personages, and intrigues of Court.

Among writers of prose of the age it would be ungrateful not to mention an author so familiar and readable as the gossiping James Howell (1594-1666) of the "Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ," a favourite bedside book of Thackeray. Howell was imprisoned by the Puritans, and wrote essays in form of letters which are full of curious anecdotes and reminiscences of travel.

Much later comes the prince of gossips, Mr. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), whose Diary in shorthand, written for his personal diversion, can never cease to divert, and, in a way, as a picture of a strange age and a strange character, to instruct. Each new dip into Mr. Pepys's manuscript, by each bolder editor, makes us like him less from the extended candour of his unparalleled confessions, which is a pity.

John Evelyn (1620-1706) depicts the same period as Pepys, as it was seen by a gentleman of stainless honour, unblemished virtue, and great curiosity in the arts, and in the nascent science. His Diary is much more entertaining than his memoir of the Lady in the "Comus" of the merry Monarch's Court, the lovely and religious Mistress Margaret Godolphin (_née_ Blague), to whom Evelyn was virtuously devoted.

Roger North (1653-1733), is admirably readable, and very modern in the tone of his satire of the godly Whigs, in the "Examen,"--when he drops into slang it is with the careless grace of Thackeray. His "Lives of the Norths," himself and his brothers, is most interesting.

[1] To him he attributes a coarse pun which might seem more familiar in the mouth of James I.