was transferred from the Greek Lectureship to the Lectureship in Rhetoric, and, on the 23rd of December in the following year, he was again transferred to another offic

bound to be in priests' orders. Of the manner in which Locke discharged his duties as a lecturer we have no record. He seems also to have serve

em, he seriously contemplated taking the step of entering holy orders, and the authorities of his college would probably be unwilling to force upon him a hasty decision. At length, however, he finally abandoned this idea, deciding in favour of the profession of physic. In the ordinary cou

ed for two months, the mission coming to nothing, in consequence of the English Government being unable or unwilling to advance the money which the Elector required as the price of his adhesion. The state-papers addressed by the Ambassador to the Government at home are mainly in Locke's handwriting; but far more interesting than these are the private letters addressed by Locke to his friends, Mr. Strachey, of Sutton Court, near Bristol, and the celebrated Robert Boyle. These are full of graphic touches descriptive of the manners and peculiarit

pped hay or logic, forsooth! Poor materia prima was canvassed cruelly; stripped of all the gay dress of her forms, and shown naked to us, though, I must confess, I had not eyes good enough to see her. The young monks (which one would not guess by their looks) are subtle people, and dispute as eagerly for materia prima

humour, with the Franciscan friars, he wa

lly than brains; and methought was very fit to be re

f the foreigners, namely, their good-natured toleratio

quarrels or animosities amongst them upon the account of religion. This good correspondence is owing partly to the power of the magistrate, and pa

riment at the Catholic ceremonies, he pays, in one of his letters to Strachey, a cheerful tribute to the personal worth of the Catholic priests. He had n

*

declined the offer. Before settling down again in Oxford, he spent a few weeks in Somersetshire, paying probably, amongst other visits, one he had promised himself to Strachey at Sutton Court, "a greater rarity than my travels have afforded me; for one may go a long way before one meets a friend." During his stay in Somersetshire, he attempted to try some

o work afresh on the studies which might qualify him to exercise the profession of medicine. In his letters

Doctor in Medicine, he never took those degrees. The obstacle may have arisen from himself, or, more probably, it may have been due to some sinister influence on the Hebdomadal Board preventing the assent of that body to the required decree. A

*

hies. The acquaintance was made through David Thomas, an Oxford physician, and the occasion of it was Lord Ashley's coming to Oxford to drink the Astrop waters. The duty of providing these waters (Astrop being a village at some distance from Oxford) seems to have been entrusted by Thomas to Locke, but, there having been some miscarriage, Locke waited on Lord Ashley to excuse the delay. "My lord," says Lady Masham, "in his wonted manner, received him very civilly, accepting his excuse with gr

made the sunbeams of a strange red dim light, was very remarkable. We had then heard nothing of the fire of London; but it appeared afterwards to be the smoke of London, then burning, which, driven this way by an easterly wind, caused this odd phenomenon." The Register, in which this entry is made begins on June 24, 1666, and contains, with many intermissions, t

ng to Lady Masham, "he was with my Lord Ashley as a man at home, and lived in that family much esteemed, not only by my lord, but b

ke had now arrived. These may be stated summarily under three heads: first, "all speculative opinions and religious worship have a clear title to universal toleration," and in these every man may use "a perfect uncontrollable liberty, without any guilt or sin at all, provided always that it be all done sincerely and out of conscience to God, according to the best of his knowledge and persuasion;" secondly, "there are some opinions and actions which are in their natural tendency absolutely destructive to human society-as, that faith may be broken with heretics; that one is bound to broach and propagate any opinion he believes himself; and such like; and, in actions, all manner of frauds and injustice-and these the magistrate ought not to tolerate at all;" thirdly, another class of opinions and actio

. To the only child, Anthony Ashley, he acted as tutor. But, by the time the youth was seventeen, Locke was entrusted with a far more delicate business than his tuition. This was no less than finding him a wife. After other young ladies had been considered and rejected, Locke accompanied his charge on a visit to the Earl of Rutland, at Belvoir Castle, and negotiated a match with the Earl's daughter, the Lady Dorothy Manners. The match seems to have been a happy one; and Locke continued his services of general utility to the Ashley family by acting on more than one occasion as Lady Dorothy's medical attendant. On the 26th of February, 1670-71, he assisted at the birth of a son and heir, Anthony, who subsequently became third Earl of Shaftesbury, and

patron to withdraw the application. Both now and on the former occasion, alluded to above (p. 16), the opposition was probably based on Locke's tendencies, known or suspected, to liberal views in religion; nor would the connexion with Lord Ashley be at all likely to mitigate the sternness of the college and university authorities. It had, of course, all along been open to him to proceed to the Doctor's degree in the ordinary way, by attending

istance in attending the Ashley household-there can be no doubt. Writing to Mapletoft, their common friend, and a physician of some eminence, in 1676, he says: "You know how thoroughly my method [of curing fevers] is approved of by an intimate and common friend of ours, and one who has closely and exhaustively examined the subject-I mean Mr. John Locke, a man whom, in the acuteness of his intellect, in the steadiness of his judgment,

ny of the articles, embodying, as they do, a sort of modified feudalism, must have been distasteful to Locke, and it is hardly possible to suppose that he was the originator of them. But perhaps we may trace his hand in the articles on religion, between which and his views, as stated in his unpublished papers written before and his published works written after this time, there is a large amount of correspondence. No man was to be permitted to be a freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that God was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. But within these limits any seven persons might constitute a church, provided that they upheld the duty of every man, if called on, to bear witness to the truth, and agreed on some external sy

(see page 127). According to a marginal note made by Sir James Tyrrell in his copy of the first edition, now in the British Museum, the discussion on this occasion turned on "the principles of morality and revealed religion." The date of this memorable meeting was, according to the same authority, the winter of 1673; but according to Lady Masham, it was 1670 or 1671. Any way, there is an entry on the main subject of the Essay in Locke's Common-place Book, beginning "Sic cogi

ice of the State, the Lord High Chancellorship of England. Locke shared in his good fortune, and was made Secretary of Presentations-that is, of the Chancellor's church patronage-with a salary of 300l. a year. The modern reader, especially when he recollects Locke's intimacy with Shaftesbury, is surprised to find that he dined at the Steward's table, that he was expected to attend prayers three times a day, and th

, a well-known Jansenist, and the friend of Pascal and Arnauld. These Essays, which were translated for the use of the Countess of Shaftesbury, were apparently not designed for publica

which places him in so incongruous a light that his biographer can hardly pass it over in silence. At the opening of the Parliament which met on February 4, 1672-73, Shaftesbury, amplifying the King's Speech, made, though it is said unwillingly and with much concern,

ourse, lost at the same time the Secretaryship of Presentations; but he did not, as meaner men might have done, try to insinuate himself into wealth and power through other avenues. "When my grandfather," says the third Earl of Shaftesbury, "quitted the Court, and be

d on the 15th of October, 1673, shortly before Shaftesbury's fall, he was sworn in as Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations, with a salary of 500l. a year.

him, puts it, "having wriggled into Ireland's faculty place." It is curious that his name does not appear in the Ch. Ch. books among the Faculty Students till the second quarter of 1675, and during that and the two s

his salary as Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, must have been in fairly comfortable circumstances. He was dispensed from the necessity of practising a profession, and, being also relieved from the pressure of public affairs, was free to follow his bent. It is probably to the