INTRODUCTION. THOMAS HOBBES, who lived into his ninety-second year, was born in April, 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, and died on the 4th of December, 1679, within ten years of the English Revolution. The whole series of events that raised the question of the limit of authority within a State, and made it the foremost question of his day in England, lay within the limits of his actual life, after he had passed the age of seventeen. He studied philosophically the Civil Wars of the reign of Charles I., and expressed calmly in his books what seemed to him to be the argument for a royal authority entirely free from popular control. He summed up his argument in the "Leviathan," which was first published in 1651, when the experiment of a Commonwealth was being tried; and he returned to the battle with his "Behemoth" after failure of the Commonwealth and Restoration of the Stuarts. If he could have maintained his vigorous life but for another nine years, and become a centenarian, he would have seen the problem practically solved in a way not dreamt of in his philosophy. Hobbes published his “Leviathan" at that age of sixty-three, mystically composed of seven times nine, which was said to form in a man's life the grand climacteric. He published it for instruction of the people at large in the philosophic rudiments of government, which, as he reasoned them, established as the best safeguard of national prosperity the absolute rule of a King. The political philosopher who followed him, and laid down principles of government that served as interpretation of the spirit of the English Revolution, was John Locke, whose "Two Treatises on Civil Government," are in another volume of this Library. Thomas Hobbes, son of a clergyman at Malmesbury, was from his earliest years an energetic student. He fastened so vigorously upon Greek and Latin, that as a school-boy he translated the whole "Medea" of Euripides into Latin verse. In the year of the death of Queen Elizabeth, Hobbes, aged fifteen, went to Oxford and entered to Magdalene Hall. After five years of study there, he became, at the age of twenty, tutor to William Lord Cavendish, whose father, Lord Hardwicke was |