to be older than his book De Cive, (first published in 1642). And he boasted of the smallness of his acquaintance with preceding writers, as if it had been a merit; declaring that if he had read as much as other men he should have been as dull of wit as they were.

Hobbes's doctrines are well known to the general English reader. He derives right and wrong from the consideration of man in a state of nature. And this state of nature is, according to him, (Leviathan, p. 62) a state of mutual war; a constant war of every man against every man. In this state of nature no moral element exists. "To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force and Fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues. Justice and Injustice are none of the faculties either of the body or the mind." (Leviathan, p. 63). From this state of nature springs the civil body or commonwealth, the origin of rights and duties. And this combination is (Leviathan, p. 87) something more than consent and concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person. The multitude, so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth. "This is the generation," he adds, "of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently," [that is with the reverence due to it] "of that Mortal God to which we owe (under the Immortal God) our peace and defence." As there is no element of justice or morality in man while still unsocial, and no society but the union of individuals, it is plain that in this way we can have no right and wrong, except what positive law and consequent punishment make such. Right is the power of enforcing: Duty is the necessity of obeying.

Since the common power thus determines all questions, and acknowledges no counterpoise in man's moral faculties,

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we may easily conceive with what terrible attributes it must be invested. "The sovereign, whether he be a single person or an assembly, contains in himself the origin of all good and justice. No man can, without injustice, protest against his ordinances" (Leviathan, p. 90). "His acts cannot be accused. He is judge, not only of what is necessary for the peace and defence of the whole, but he is judge of what doctrines are fit to be taught" (Leviathan, p.91). "It belongeth to him that hath the sovereign power to be judge, or constitute all judges, of opinions and doctrines, as a thing necessary to peace, thereby to prevent discord and civil war." And thus, even men's moral nature is annihilated in the presence of this overwhelming power. "In the next place," he says in another part of his work (Leviathan, p. 168), "I observe the diseases of a Commonwealth, that proceed from the poison of seditious doctrines; whereof one is that every private man is judge of good and evil actions," whereas, he says, "it is manifest that the measure of good and evil actions is the Civil Law; and the Judge, the Legislator, who is always the representative of the Commonwealth. From this false doctrine' men are disposed to debate with themselves, and dispute the commands of the commonwealth; and afterwards to obey or disobey them, as in their private judgments they shall think fit: whereby the Commonwealth is distracted and weakened.” Of course the authority of conscience is thus abolished by the power of Hobbes's Commonwealth; nor does he shun this consequence. "Another doctrine repugnant to Civil Society is, that whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin: and it dependeth (this even) on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. Therefore, though he that is subject to no Civil Law sinneth in all he does against his conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a commonwealth because the Law is the public conscience, by

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which he hath already undertaken to be guided." It is evident that such principles must annihilate all Civil Liberty as they destroy all Morality. Accordingly Hobbes maintains (Leviathan, p. 89) that the sovereign power cannot be forfeited; that the subject cannot change the form of government. Not only so: but he dwells with strong predilection upon the advantages of the most absolute monarchy. Thus he urges (Leviathan, p. 96) that in monarchy, the private interest of the man is the same with the public interest of the sovereign ;—that a monarch receiveth counsel of whom, when, and where he pleaseth:"-" but when a sovereign assembly hath need of counsel, none are admitted but such as have a right thereto from the beginning; which for the most part are of those who have been versed more in the acquisition of wealth than of knowledge:"—to which other advantages of monarchy are added and insisted upon; while the inconveniences of monarchy, though stated, are diluted and balanced by bringing forwards greater inconveniences of assemblies.

Such then are the consequences which result from taking man, divested of any moral principles, as the element of the world, and building up the frame of Civil Society by the mere juxta-position of individuals. In this way is formed that Great Leviathan, which, in this system, establishes and rules over all human institutions, and even determines what shall be held as divine. In reading this account we are almost led to imagine to ourselves a monstrous idol, composed of human beings, yet invested with the attributes of superhuman power, and worshipped as the Creator of Justice and Law, Peace and Order, Truth and Religion. But perhaps you think such an image too strange, too monstrous, too terrible to be steadily dwelt upon. Not so. It is the image offered to us by the author of the Leviathan himself:-offered too, not in the vague lineaments and airy colours which words bestow, in which so many an uncouth and extravagant figure

but carefully drawn as a It is the frontispiece of

is presented without offending us; visible picture in lines and shades. his book; and I think no one can look at the representation without discovering in it a kind of grotesque sublimity. This is the picture.-Over a wide spreading landscape, in which lie villages and cultivated fields, castles and churches, rivers and ports, predominates the vast form of the Sovereign, the Leviathan, the Mortal God. Its breast and head rise behind the most distant hills; its arins stretch to the foreground of the picture. Its body and members are composed of thousands upon thousands of human figures, in the varied dresses of all classes of society; all with their faces turned towards the sovereign head, and bending towards it in attitudes of worship. The head has upon it a kingly crown; the right hand bears a mighty sword; the left a magnificent crosier. In the front of the picture is a city with its gates and streets, its bastions and its citadel; in which, high above all other edifices, rise the two towers of a noble cathedral. Nor is this figure thus predominating over the country and the city, the only intimation how vast and comprehensive, how strong and terrible, is the power thus bodied forth. Below, in various compartments, are emblems of the provinces and instruments of this power. One side, a castle on a rock, from the battlements of which the smoke rolls, as a piece of ordnance is discharged; on the other, a church with a figure upon its roof, of Faith, holding her cross; on one side, the coronet; on the other, the mitre. On the one side is a cannon, the thunderbolt of war; on the other the thunderbolts, in their mythological form, indicating, perhaps, the fulminations of the ecclesiastical sovereign. On the one side, are the peaceable arms of Logic, Syllogism and Dilemma, Spiritual and Temporal arguments; on the other, the sharper arguments of material arms, to be used by nations when reason fails, lances and firelocks, drums and colours; finally,

on one side the judiciary tribunal, seated in solemn order, with their dark robes and formal caps; on the other, the more stormy tribunal of the battle-field, the charge of hostile armies, sloping spears, bristling through volumes of smoke, the combat of horse and foot, the victors and the dying. Nor must I pass unnoticed the physiognomy of the supreme figure itself. In the common editions, the face has a manifest resemblance to Cromwell (the work was published in 1651), although it wears, as I have said, a regal crown: and in these, the engraving is well executed and finished. But in the copy belonging to Trinity College Library, the face appears to be intended for Charles the First. engraving of this copy is very much worse than the other, and is not worked into the same careful detail by the artist, although the outline is the same: and the text of the book is a separate and worse impression, although the errata are the same with the other copies, as well as the date. How Hobbes himself, or any other person, should come to print the Leviathan in this manner, I am quite unable to explain.

The

I now proceed to notice the reception which this and other works of Hobbes met with. Many of his doctrines were at once condemned, not by divines only, but by the generality of sober-minded men. Among these we may place the great and good Lord Clarendon, who objected to them as soon as they were published. He relates, that as soon as he had read the Leviathan, Hobbes's friend, Sir Charles Cavendish, asked him, by the author's request, what his opinion was of the book. "Upon which," he adds, "I wished he would tell him, that I could not enough wonder, that a man who had so great a reverence for civil government, that he resolved all wisdom, and religion itself, into simple submission to it, should publish a book for which by the constitution of any government now established in Europe, whether monarchical or democratical, the author