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to show that my friendship died not with his father." One of the most amiable and attractive traits in Locke's character is the eagerness which he always displayed in advising, encouraging, or helping forward the sons of his friends. Any opportunity of doing so always gave him the most evident satisfaction, as, from his correspondence, we see in the case of Frank Masham, the two young Furlys, young Limborch, and numerous others.

I must now no longer delay the introduction to the reader of Locke's young cousin, Peter King. Locke had an uncle, Peter Locke, whose daughter Anne had married Jeremy King, a grocer and salter in a substantial way of business at Exeter. Such a marriage was not necessarily any disparagement to Anne Locke's family, as the present line of demarcation between professional men and the smaller gentry, on the one side, and substantial retail tradesmen, on the other, hardly existed at that time. They had a son, Peter, born in 1669, who was consequently Locke's first cousin once removed. The boy seems for some time to have been employed in his father's business, but he had a voracious appetite for books, and showed a decided talent for the acquisition of learning. Locke, on one of his visits to Exeter, discovered these qualities, and persuaded Peter King's parents to allow him to change his mode of life, and study for one of the learned professions. Whether he went to any English school does not appear; but, during Locke's stay in Holland, he resided for some time in the University of Leyden. His studies there embraced at least classics, theology, and law; and when he returned to England, apparently in 1690, he brought back with him a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Constitution and Discipline of the Primitive Church. As in this treatise he maintained that Presbyterianism was the original form of Church government, he probably never had any serious intention, notwithstanding his theological proclivities of entering holy orders in the Established Church. Any way, in October, 1694, he was entered a student of the Middle Temple; and in Trinity Term, 1698, he was called to the bar. During his residence in London as a law student, he must have been frequently at Oates, and Locke must have frequently visited him in his chambers in the Temple. The first extant letter from Locke to King, dated June 27, 1698, at any rate, assumes intimacy and frequency of intercourse. "Your company here had been ten times welcomer than any the best excuse you could send; but you may now pretend to be a man of business, and there can be nothing said to you.' " Very sound was the advice with which the elder relative concluded his letter to the young barrister: "When you first open your mouth at the bar, it should be in some easy plain matter that you are perfectly master of." King's success in his profession was very rapid, and he soon became one of the most popular counsel on the Western Circuit. In the general election of 1700 he attained one of the first objects of ambition at which a rising young barrister generally aims--a seat in the House of Commons. Owing, probably, to his cousin's influence with the Whig leaders, he was returned for the small borough

of Beer Alston, in Devonshire, which he continued to represent in several successive Parliaments. Locke, writing to him shortly before the meeting of Parliament, entreats him not to go circuit, as he had intended to do, but to devote himself at once to his Parliamentary duties. "I am sure there was never so critical a time, when every honest member of Parliament ought to watch his trust, and that you will see before the end of the vacation." The loss to his pocket, his good relative intimates, delicately enough, shall be amply made up to him. King took his cousin's advice on this point, but, fortunately and wisely, did not take it on another. " My advice to you is not to speak at all in the House for some time, whatever fair opportunity you may seem to have." King was advised to communicate his "light or apprehensions" to some " honest speaker," who might make use of them for him. Locke, we must remember, was now becoming old, and though not, like many old men, jealous of his juniors, he could not escape the infirmity of all old men, that of exaggerating the youthfulness of youth, and so of insisting too stringently on the modesty becoming those in whom he was interested. King broke the ice soon after the meeting of Parliament, and Locke had the prudence and good-nature to show no resentment at his advice having been neglected. His cousin, however, never became a great Parliamentary speaker; but he soon gained a reputation for being a thoroughly sound lawyer and a thoroughly honest man. He rose successively to be Recorder of London, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Lord High Chancellor of England. He was also ennobled as Lord King of Ockham, and, by a very curious coincidence, his four sons in succession bore the same title. To one of his descendants, his great-grandson, also named Peter, we owe the publication of many documents and letters connected with Locke, and the biography so well known as Lord King's Life of Locke. The present representative of the family, and the direct descendant in the male line of Peter King, is the Earl of Lovelace. As Peter King was, to all intents, Locke's adopted son, we may thus regard Locke as the founder of an illustrious line in the English peerage, and there are certainly few, if any, of our ennobled families who can point to a founder whose name is so likely to be the heritage of all future ages.

King kept Locke well posted in all that went on in Parliament, and seems also to have been a constant visitor at Oates. Soon after his election, Sir Francis Masham had considerately proposed to Locke that his cousin should "steal down sometimes with him on Saturday, and return on Monday." On one of these occasions, in the Easter holidays of 1701, King was accompanied by young Lord Ashley, now become the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke had then surmounted his winter troubles, and his old pupil pronounces him as well as he had ever known him.

Amongst Locke's correspondents in these years was the celebrated physician, Dr. Sloane, now Secretary of the Royal Society, afterwards created Sir Hans Sloane. In writing to him at the end of the century, evidently in answer to a request, Locke proposes a

scheme for rectifying the calendar. Notwithstanding the reformation which had already taken place in many foreign countries, it will be recollected that the English year then began on the 25th of March, instead of the 1st of January, and that, by reckoning the year at exactly 365 days, or at 11 m. 14 sec. longer than its actual length, our time lagged ten days behind that of most otherEuropean countries, as well as the real solar time. The inconvenience, especially in transactions with foreign merchants, had become very great. The advent of the new century, inasmuch as the centenary year would be counted as a leap-year in England, but not in other countries where the new style or Gregorian calendar prevailed, would add an eleventh day to the amount of discrepancy, and hence the subject was now attracting more than ordinary attention. Locke's remedy was to omit the intercalar day in the year 1700, according to the rule of the Gregorian calendar, as also for the ten next leap-years following, "by which easy way," he says, we should in forty-four years insensibly return to the new style." "This," he adds, "I call an easy way, because it would be without prejudice or disturbance to any one's civil rights, which, by lopping off ten or eleven days at once in any one year, might perhaps receive inconvenience, the only objection that ever I heard made against rectifying our account." He also suggested that the year should begin, as in most other European countries, on the 1st of January. No change, however, was made till, by an Act of Parliament passed in 1750-51, it was ordered that the year 1752 should begin on the 1st of January, and that the day succeeding the 2d of September in that year should be reckoned as the 14th. Locke's other correspondence with Sloane shows the interest which he still took in medical matters, and how ready he always was to expend time and thought on attending to the ailments of his poor neighbours at Oates.

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During the latter years of Locke's life his principal literary employment consisted in paraphrasing and writing commentaries on some of St. Paul's epistles. He thought that this portion of Scripture offered peculiar difficulties, and finding, as he says, that he did not understand it himself, he set to work, rather for his own sake, and perhaps also that of the household at Oates, than with any view of publication, to attempt to clear up its obscurities. The labour was a work of love; and to a man of Locke's devout disposition, with almost a child-like confidence in the guidance of Scripture, the occupation must have afforded a peculiar solace in the intervals of his disease, and as he felt that he was rapidly approaching the confines of that other world which had so long been familiar to his thoughts. Though he was induced to consent to the publication of these commentaries, and though he himself prepared an introduction to them, they did not appear till after his death. They were then issued by instalments, coming out at intervals between 1705 and 1707 inclusively.

Locke's political interests, always keen, were specially active in the winter of 1701-02. England was just then on the point of

engaging in the war of the Spanish Succession. In the previous September an alliance against France and Spain had been concluded between the emperor and the two great maritime powers, England and Holland. Almost immediately after the conclusion of this treaty, James the Second had died at St. Germain, and not only had the French king allowed his son to be proclaimed King of England but had himself received him with royal honours at the court of Versailles. The patriotic and Protestant feeling of the country was thoroughly roused, and the new Parliament, which met on the 30th of December, was prepared to take the most energetic measures for the purpose of supporting the national honor and the Protestant succession. The king's speech, on opening the Parliament, excited an outburst of enthusiasm throughout the nation. He conjured the members to disappoint the hopes of their enemies by their unanimity. As he was ready to show himself the common father of his people, he exhorted them to cast out the spirit of party and division, so that there might no longer be any distinction but between those who were friends to the Protestant religion and the present establishment, and those who wished for a popish prince and a French_government. The speech was printed in English, Dutch, and French, framed, and hung up, as an article of furniture, in the houses of good Protestants, both at home and abroad. Locke, writing to Peter King four days after the meeting of Parliament, asks him to send a copy of the king's speech, "printed by itself, and without paring off the edges." He suggests that, in addition to what the two Houses had done, the city of London and counties of England should, "with joined hearts and hands return his Majesty addresses of thanks for his taking such care of them." "Think of this with yourself,” he says, “and think of it with others who can and ought to think how to save us out of the hands of France, into which we must fall, unless the whole nation exert its utmost vigour, and that speedily." He is specially urgent on his cousin not to leave town, or to think of circuit business, till the kingdom has been put in an effectual state of defence. "I think it no good husbandry for a man to get a few fees on circuit and lose Westminster Hall." By losing Westminster Hall he does not, apparently, mean losing the chance of a judgeship, but forfeiting those rights and liberties, and that personal and national independence which the Revolution had only so lately restored. "For, I assure you, Westminster Hall is at stake, and I wonder how any of the house can sleep till he sees England in a better state of defence, and how he can talk of anything else till that is done." But a majority, at least, of the House of Commons was fully alive to its responsibilities; enormous supplies were voted, and almost every conceivable measure was taken for securing the Protestant succession to the crown. A few days after Locke wrote the letter last quoted, King William died. His reflections on that event or on the political prospects under Willlam's successor, we do not possess.

As the war proceeded, Locke's old friend, the Earl of Mon

mouth, now become Earl of Peterborough, was entrusted with a naval expedition against the Spanish possessions in the West Indies. He had a great desire to see Locke before his departure, and, Locke being unable to come up to London, he and the Countess drove down to Oates about the middle of November, 1702. It is characteristic of the times that Locke was "much in pain " about their getting back safely to town, the days being then so short. His young friend, Arent Furly, who was also a protégé and frequent correspondent of Lord Shaftesbury, went out as Lord Peterborough's secretary, and seems to have acquitted himself in the position with marked diligence and success. The early promise which he gave, however, was soon blighted. This young play-fellow and foster-child, as he might also have been called, of Locke, died only a few years after him, in 1711 or 1712. Before accompanying Lord Peterborough on his expedition, he had been living for some time, first at Oates, and afterwards in lodgings in the neighbourhood, for the purpose of learning English.

It is gratifying to find that, during the autumn of this year, Locke had received a visit from Newton. During the discussion of the re-coinage question, and the active operations which followed for the purpose of carrying out the decisions of Parliament, they must have been thrown a good deal together. Montague declared that, had it not been for the energetic measures taken by Newton, as Warden of the Mint, the re-coinage would never have been ef fected. When, however, Newton came down to visit Locke at Oates, in 1702, their conversation seems to have turned mainly on theological topics. Locke showed Newton his notes upon the Corinthians, and Newton requested the loan of them. But, like most borrowers, he neglected to return them, nor did he take any notice of a letter from Locke, who was naturally very anxious to recover his manuscript. Peter King was asked to try to manage the matter. He was to call at Newton's residence in Jermyn Street, to deliver a second note, and to find out, if he could, the reasons of Newton's silence, and of his having kept the paper so long. But he was to do this "with all the tenderness in the world," for "he is a nice man to deal with, and a little too apt to raise in himself suspicions where there is no ground." The emissary was also, if he could do it with sufficient adroitness, to discover Newton's opinion of the Commentary. But he was by no means to give the slightest cause of offence. “Mr. Newton is really a very valuable man, not only for his wonderful skill in mathematics, but in divinity too, and his great knowledge in the Scriptures, wherein I know few his equals. And therefore pray manage the whole matter so as not only to preserve me in his good opinion, but to increase me in it; and be sure to press him to nothing but what he is forward in himself to do." In this letter Locke, notwithstanding the caution with which he felt it necessary to approach one of so susceptible a temperament, says, "I have several reasons to think him truly my friend." And in this generous judgment there can be little doubt he was right. The friends probably never met