I never could understand, was not
murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the
seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for
murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can prove that
he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least
resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very
highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest die
to refuse to be murdered, when a competent force appears to murder you.
However, gentlemen, though he was not murdered, I am happy to assure you
that (by his own account) he was three times very near being murdered. The
first time was in the spring of 1640, when he pretends to have circulated
a little MS. on the king's behalf, against the Parliament; he never could
produce this MS., by the by; but he says that, "Had not his Majesty
dissolved the Parliament," (in May,) "it had brought him into danger of his
life." Dissolving the Parliament, however, was of no use; for, in November
of the same year, the Long Parliament assembled, and Hobbes, a second time,
fearing he should be murdered, ran away to France. This looks like the
madness of John Dennis, who thought that Louis XIV. would never make peace
with Queen Anne, unless he were given up to his vengeance; and actually ran
away from the sea-coast in that belief. In France, Hobbes managed to take
care of his throat pretty well for ten years; but at the end of that time,
by way of paying court to Cromwell, he published his Leviathan. The old
coward now began to "funk" horribly for the third time; he fancied the
swords of the cavaliers were constantly at his throat, recollecting how
they had served the Parliament ambassadors at the Hague and Madrid. "Turn,"
says he, in his dog-Latin life of himself,

"Tum venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham;
Tanquam proscripto terror ubique aderat."

And accordingly he ran home to England. Now, certainly, it is very true
that a man deserved a cudgelling for writing Leviathan; and two or three
cudgellings for writing a pentameter ending so villanously as--"terror
ubique aderat!" But no man ever thought him worthy of anything beyond
cudgelling. And, in fact, the whole story is a bounce of his own. For, in a
most abusive letter which he wrote "to a learned person," (meaning Wallis
the mathematician,) he gives quite another account of the matter, and says
(p. 8,) he ran home "b