nd hints towards the
_Letter on Toleration_ can be found in fragments of various dates
between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life. Of the
_Two Treatises_ the first seems to have been written between 1680 and
1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch exile.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the evidence for these dates see the convincing argument
of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his _Life of Locke_, Vol. II, pp. 165-7.]

The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were passed in
semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first as
Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years, he could
not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public work was only
intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly valued; and he seems
to have won no small confidence from William in diplomatic 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 Fil