Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/38

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Locke
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Locke

tary to the council of trade on account of the emptiness of the exchequer. He also abandoned a petition for his restoration to the Christ Church studentship, finding that it would disturb the society and displace his successor (ib. ii. 199). He held the commissionership of appeals till his death, when he was succeeded by Addison. The place was almost a sinecure, though it occasionally gave him some occupation (ib. ii. 345). He settled in Dorset Court, Channel Row, Westminster, soon after his return, and afterwards took some chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which he only occupied occasionally. He found the smoke of London unfavourable to his health, and from the spring of 1691 became domiciled at Oates, in the parish of High Laver, Essex. The owner was Sir Francis Masham, whose second wife was Damaris, daughter of Ralph Cudworth. Edward Clarke of Chipley in Somerset was a common friend of Locke and the Cudworths. A correspondence between Locke and Clarke from 1681 onwards, in which the Cudworths are frequently mentioned, is now in possession of Mr. Sanford of Nynehead, Taunton (see Fraser, pp. 61-2). Locke had been acquainted with Lady Masham, then unmarried, before his stay in Holland. The family now included her mother, her stepdaughter Esther, and her son Francis (b. 1686); and Locke was on the most affectionate terms with them all. He carried on a playful correspondence with Esther, whom he called his Laudabridis, from the romances which she occasionally read to him, and for the rest of his life lived among an attached domestic circle. Locke paid 20s. a week as board for himself and his servant, whose wages were 20s. a quarter. He kept his accounts most systematically (see ib. pp. 219-226, with some interesting extracts from the 'Lovelace Papers').

He now for the first time became a public author. The 'Essay' (of which the dedication is dated May 1689) appeared early in 1690. Locke received 30l. for the copyright of the first edition. The bookseller afterwards agreed to give him six bound copies of every subsequent edition, and ten shillings for every additional sheet (King, ii. 50). The bargain must have been remunerative to the publisher. A second edition was called for in August 1692; Locke's alterations and the slowness of the press delayed its appearance till the autumn of 1694, when the additions were also printed separately. A third edition, almost a reprint of the second, appeared in June 1695; and a fourth, again carefully revised (with new chapters on the 'Association of Ideas' and 'Enthusiasm'), in the autumn of 1699 (dated 1700). A fifth edition, with a few corrections by Locke, appeared posthumously in 1706. A French edition by Pierre Coste [q. v.] appeared at Amsterdam in 1700. A Latin translation by Richard Burridge, an Irish clergyman, begun in 1696, appeared in 1701. The 'Essay' had already been recommended for students at Trinity College, Dublin, by the provost, St. George Ashe [q. v.], in 1692; and an abridgment for the use of students was prepared by John Wynne, afterwards bishop of St. Asaph, with Locke's approval, and published in 1696. The heads, of colleges at Oxford agreed in 1703 that tutors should not read it with their pupils (ib. i. 357-9). The prohibition seems to have acted only as an additional advertisement. These dates are sufficient to show that few of the works which have made epochs in philosophy have made their way so rapidly. Locke became at once the leading philosopher of the time. Other works of more immediate application confirmed his authority. In the autumn of 1685 Locke had addressed to Limborch a letter upon 'Toleration,' an expansion of his early 'Essay' (see above). His friend Tyrrell had urged him to publish in a letter dated 6 May 1687 (ib. i. 312), as appropriate to the political situation. It was, however, first published in Latin as 'Epistola de Tolerantia' in Holland, probably by Limborch, in the spring of 1689. An English translation by William Popple appeared in the same autumn, French and Dutch translations having been already issued. Locke was curiously anxious to preserve his anonymity upon this occasion, and his only angry letter to Limborch was caused by hearing that his friend had revealed the secret to two of his intimates (ib. ii. 206). Two further letters, in answer to attacks by Jonas Proast, followed in 1690 and 1692; and a fourth, begun in 1704, was interrupted by his death. His 'Two Treatises of Government' were published early in 1690. Locke says that they were the beginning and end of a discourse, of which the middle had been lost. The first is an attack upon Sir Robert Filmer [q. v.], whose 'Patriarcha' was published in 1680, and one or both of Locke's treatises were probably written about that time. His own principles, he says, were fully vindicated bv William III. Locke's theories, as expressed in these treatises and in the letters upon 'Toleration,' supplied the whigs with their political philosophy for the next century; and although both he and his followers were content with a partial application, they in fact laid the foundation of the more thoroughgoing doctrines of Bentham and the