horses, for a four days' journey into the north of England with a young scion of the Ashleys

upon such an errand as that! Our doctors in metaphysics do not, I believe, engage in similar service; yet I suppose nice observation would disclose great and curious mental activities in the evolution of such schemes.

The philosopher must have known Dryden, both being early members of the Royal Society; but I have a fancy that Locke was a man who did not save on rarest occasions. take a pipe and a mug at such a place as Will's Coffee-house. His tastes led him more to banquets at Exeter House. There was foreign travel, also, in which he accomplished himself in continental languages and socialities; he had offers of diplomatic preferment, but his doubtful health (always making him what overwell people call a fussy man) forbade acceptance; else we might have had in him another Sir William Temple. Shaftesbury interested him in his scheme of new planting the Carolina colony in America; and John Locke drew up rules for its political guidance. Some of these sound very drolly now. Thus no man was to be a freeman of Car

olina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that he was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. The members of one church were not to molest or persecute those of another. Again, “no one shall be permitted to plead before a court of justice for money or reward." What a howling desert this would make of most of our courts!

Again, he writes with great zest upon the subject of Education, and almost with the warmth of that old Roger Ascham, whose maxims I cited in one of our earlier talks:

"Till you can find a school wherein it is possible for the master to look after the manners of his scholars, and can show as great effects of his care of forming their minds to virtue, and their carriage to good breeding, as of forming their tongues to the learned languages, you must confess that you have a strange value for words, to hazard your sons' innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin."

And again:

"I know not why anyone should waste his time and beat his head about the Latin grammar, who does not intend to be a critic, or make speeches, and write despatches in it. If his use of it be only to understand some books writ in it without a critical knowledge of the tongue itself, reading alone will attain his end, without charging his mind with the multiplied rules and intricacies of grammar."

"If there may be any reasons against children's making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say and of more weight against their making verses

--

verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to poetry, 'tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child, and waste his time about that which can never succeed and if he have a poetic vein — methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled : for if he proves a successful rhymer, and get once the reputation of a wit, I desire it may be considered what company and places he is likely to spend his time in-nay, and his estate too."

By which I am more than ever convinced that Locke did not sup often with Dryden at "Will's,” and that you will find no pleasant verselets - look as hard as you may on a single page of his discourse on the Human Understanding.

When Charles grew suspicious of Shaftesbury, and the Earl was shorn of his power, no little of the odium fell upon his protégé; and for a time there was an enforced—or at least a very prudent-exile for Locke, at one time in France and at another in Holland. It was on these absences that his pen was busiest. In 1689 he returned to England in the trail of William III.; came to new honors under that monarch; published his great work, which had been simmering in his brain for ten years or

more; made a great fame at home and abroad, and wrote wisely on many topics. Meanwhile his old. enemy, the asthma, was afflicting him sorely. London smoke was a torture to him; but when he went only so little distance away (twenty miles northward) as the country home of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham, a delightful calm came to him. He was given his own apartment there; . never did hosts more enjoy a guest; and never a guest enjoyed more the immunities and kindnesses which Sir Francis and Lady bestowed upon him. Twelve or fourteen years of idyllic life for the philosopher followed, in the wooded alleys and upon the charming lawns of the old manor-house of Oates, in the county of Essex; there were leisurely, coy journeys to London; there were welcoming visits from old friends; there was music indoors, and music of the birds without. Bachelors

rarely come to those quietudes and joys of a homelife which befell the old age of Locke, and equipped all his latter days with such serenities as were a foretaste of heaven.

He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among the poets: he sleeps

more quietly in the pretty church-yard of HighLavor, a little way off, northward, from the New Park of Epping Forest.

End of the King and Others.

The lives of these two men-Dryden and Locke -have brought us past the whole reach of Charles IL's reign. That ignoble monarch has met his fate courageously; some days before the immediate end he knew it was coming, and had kind words for those about him.

He died on a Friday,* and on the Sunday before had held great revel in the famous gallery of Whitehall; next day came the warnings, and then the blow paralytic, or other such- which shrivelled his showy powers, and brought his swarthy face to a whiteness and a death-like pallor that shocked those gay people who belonged in the palace. Then came the scourging with hot iron, and the administration of I know not what foul drugs that belonged to the blind medication of that day-all in vain; there were suspicions of poison; but the *February 6, 1685.