It is a misfortune that Clarendon did not write a character of Hobbes, and, more than this, that there is no character of Hobbes by any one which corresponds in kind to the other characters in this collection.  But in answering the Leviathan, Clarendon thought it well to state by way of introduction that he was on friendly terms with the author, and the passage here quoted from his account of their relations is in effect a character.  He condemned Hobbes’s political theories; ’Yet I do hope’, he says, ’nothing hath fallen from my Pen, which implies the least undervaluing of Mr. Hobbes his Person, or his Parts.’

Page 181, l. 21. ha’s, a common spelling at this time and earlier, on the false assumption that has was a contraction of haves.

55.

Bodleian Library, MS. Aubrey 9, foll. 34-7, 41, 42, 46-7.

The text of these notes on Hobbes is taken direct from Aubrey’s manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library.  The complete life is printed in Brief Lives by John Aubrey, edited by Andrew Clark, 1898, vol. i, pp. 321-403.

Aubrey collected most of his biographical notes, to which he gave the title ‘[Greek:  Schediasmata.] Brief Lives’, in order to help Anthony a Wood in the compilation of his Athenae Oxonienses.  ’I have, according to your desire’, he wrote to Wood in 1680, ’putt in writing these minutes of lives tumultuarily, as they occur’d to my thoughts or as occasionally I had information of them....  ’Tis a taske that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me.’  Independently of Wood, Aubrey had collected material for a life of Hobbes, in accordance with a promise he had made to Hobbes himself.  All his manuscript notes were submitted to Wood, who made good use of them.  On their return Aubrey deposited them in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the library of which is now merged in the Bodleian.

The notes were written ‘tumultuarily’, jotted down hastily, and as hastily added to, altered, and transposed.  They are a first draft for the fair copy which was never made.  The difficulty of giving a true representation of them in print is increased by Aubrey’s habit of inserting above the line alternatives to words or phrases without deleting the original words or even indicating his preference.  In the present text the later form has, as a rule, been adopted, the other being given in a footnote.

‘The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesburie’ is by far the longest of Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives’, but it does not differ from the others in manner.  The passages selected may be regarded as notes for a character.

Page 183, ll. 1 ff.  Aubrey is a little more precise in his notes on Bacon.  ’Mr. Thomas Hobbes told me ... that he was employed in translating part of the Essayes, viz. three of them, one whereof was that of the Greatnesse of Cities, the other two I have now forgott’ (ed.  A. Clark, vol. i, p. 83).  On the evidence of style, Aldis Wright thought that the other two essays translated by Hobbes were ’Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ and ‘Of Innovation’:  see the preface to his edition of Bacon’s Essays, 1862, pp. xix, xx.  The translation appeared in 1638 under the title Sermones fideles, sive interiora rerum.