eviathan_ on the
philosophical side, appeared in Latin in 1655, in English next year.
Besides minor works, Hobbes employed his old age on a translation of Homer
into verse, and on a sketch of the Civil Wars called _Behemoth_.

His verse is a mere curiosity, though a considerable curiosity. The chief
of it (the translation of Homer written in the quatrain, which his friend
Davenant's _Gondibert_ had made popular) is completely lacking in poetical
quality, of which, perhaps, no man ever had less than Hobbes; and it is
written on a bad model. But it has so much of the nervous bull-dog strength
which, in literature if not in life, was Hobbes's main characteristic, that
it is sometimes both a truer and a better representative of the original
than some very mellifluous and elegant renderings. It is as a prose writer,
however, that Hobbes made, and that he will keep, his fame. With his
principles in the various branches of philosophy we have little or nothing
to do. In choosing them he manifested, no doubt, something of the same
defiance of authority, and the same self-willed preference for his own not
too well-educated opinion, which brought him to grief in his encounter with
Wallis. But when he had once left his starting points, his sureness of
reasoning, his extreme perspicacity, and the unerring clearness and
certainty with which he kept before him, and expressed exactly what he
meant, made him at once one of the greatest thinkers and one of the
greatest writers of England. Hobbes never "pays himself with words," never
evades a difficulty by becoming obscure, never meanders on in the graceful
allusive fashion of many philosophers,--a fashion for which the prevalent
faults of style were singularly convenient in his time. He has no ornament,
he does not seem to aim at anything more than the simplest and most
straightforward presentation of his views. But this very aim, assisted by
his practice in writing the terse and clear, if not very elegant, Latin
which was the universal language of the literary Europe of his time,
suffices to preserve him from most of the current sins. Moreover, it is
fair to remember that, though the last to die, he was the first to be born
of the authors mentioned in this chapter, and that he may be supposed, late
as he wrote, to have formed his style before the period of Jacobean and
Caroline luxuriance.

Almost any one of Hobbes's books would suffice to illustrate his style; but
the short and intere