matters.  Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high respect, and he had the warm friendship of Sir Isaac Newton.  He published some short discussions on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the destruction of the censorship of the press.  Two years earlier he had published his Thoughts on Education, in which the observant reader may find the germ of most of Emile’s ideas.  He did not fail to revise the Essay from time to time; and his Reasonableness of Christianity, which, through Toland, provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed Locke in retort a master of the controversial art, was in some sort the foundation of the deistic debate in the next epoch.  But his chief work had already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the affection of his friends.  Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid circumstances of singular majesty.  He had lived a full life, and few have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing in omniscience.  He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham has said of him that beyond which no man may dare to aspire.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Fox-Bourne, op. cit.  Letter from Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc.]

III

Locke’s Two Treatises of Government are different both in object and in value.  The first is a detailed and tiresome response to the historic imagination of Sir Robert Filmer.  In his Patriarcha, which first saw the light in 1680, though it had been written long before, the latter had sought to reach the ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the element of contract upon which the great thinker depended.  “I consent with him,” said Filmer of Hobbes, “about the Rights of exercising Government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it.”  That power must be absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his method of proof is to derive the title of Charles I from Adam.  Little difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as Locke points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived, the good Sir Robert does not satisfactorily determine.  Locke takes him up point by point, and there is little enough left, save a sense that history is the root of institutions, when he has done.  What troubles us is rather why Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so feeble an opponent.  The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it.  The answer doubtless lies in Hobbes’ unsavory fame.  The man who made the Church a mere department of the State and justified not less the title of Cromwell than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very practical problem in hand.  And Locke could answer that he was answering Hobbes implicitly in the second Treatise.  And though Filmer might never have been known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he doubtless symbolized what many a nobleman’s chaplain preached to his master’s dependents at family prayers.