“Tum venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham;
  Tanquam proscripto terror ubique aderat.”

And accordingly he ran home to England.  Now, certainly, it is very true that a man deserved a cudgelling for writing Leviathan; and two or three cudgellings for writing a pentameter ending so villanously as—­“terror ubique aderat!” But no man ever thought him worthy of anything beyond cudgelling.  And, in fact, the whole story is a bounce of his own.  For, in a most abusive letter which he wrote “to a learned person,” (meaning Wallis the mathematician,) he gives quite another account of the matter, and says (p. 8,) he ran home “because he would not trust his safety with the French clergy;” insinuating that he was likely to be murdered for his religion, which would have been a high joke indeed—­Tom’s being brought to the stake for religion.

Bounce or not bounce, however, certain it is, that Hobbes, to the end of his life, feared that somebody would murder him.  This is proved by the story I am going to tell you:  it is not from a manuscript, but, (as Mr. Coleridge says,) it is as good as manuscript; for it comes from a book now entirely forgotten, viz., “The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined; in a Conference between him and a Student in Divinity,” (published about ten years before Hobbes’s death.) The book is anonymous, but it was written by Tennison, the same who, about thirty years after, succeeded Tillotson as Archbishop of Canterbury.  The introductory anecdote is as follows:  “A certain divine, it seems, (no doubt Tennison himself,) took an annual tour of one month to different parts of the island.  In one of these excursions (1670) he visited the Peak in Derbyshire, partly in consequence of Hobbes’s description of it.  Being in that neighborhood, he could not but pay a visit to Buxton; and at the very moment of his arrival, he was fortunate enough to find a party of gentlemen dismounting at the inn door, amongst whom was a long thin fellow, who turned out to be no less a person than Mr. Hobbes, who probably had ridden over from Chattsworth.  Meeting so great a lion,—­a tourist, in search of the picturesque, could do no less than present himself in the character of bore.  And luckily for this scheme, two of Mr. Hobbes’s companions were suddenly summoned away by express; so that, for the rest of his stay at Buxton, he had Leviathan entirely to himself, and had the honor of bowsing with him in the evening.  Hobbes, it seems, at first showed a good deal of stiffness, for he was shy of divines; but this wore off, and he became very sociable and funny, and they agreed to go into the bath together.  How Tennison could venture to gambol in the same water with Leviathan, I cannot explain; but so it was:  they frolicked about like two dolphins, though Hobbes must have been as old as the hills; and “in those intervals wherein they abstained from swimming and plunging themselves,” [i.e., diving,] “they discoursed of many things relating to the Baths of the Ancients,