The best of Hobbema s dated pictures are those of the years 1663 to 1667. Of the former, several in the galleries of Brussels and St Petersburg, and one in the Holford collection, are celebrated. Another was shown as the property of Lord Hatherton at Man chester. Of 1665 line specimens are in the Grosvenor gallery and the collection of Sir R. Wallace. Of seven pieces in the National Gallery, including the Avenue at Middelharnis, which some assign to 1689, two are dated 1667. A sample of the last of these years is also in the Fitzwilliam museum at Cambridge. The value of Hob bema s pictures may be gathered from this that the Watermil] bought from the Schneider collection in 1876 for the Antwerp museum cost 100,000 francs (4000), whilst a smaller landscape in the Hodshen sale at Amsterdam was knocked down to Sir Ii. Wallace for 49,500 florins, or 4300. The Brussels gallery also bought a Hobbema in 1874 for 60,000 francs. Amongst the master pieces in private hands in England may be noticed two land scapes in Buckingham palace, one belonging to Lord Overstone, two to the Earl of Ellesmere, and one to Mr Walter of Bearwood. On the Continent we register a Wood in the Berlin gallery, a Forest belonging to the duchess of Sagan in Paris, and a Glade in the Louvre. There are other fine Hobbemas in the Arenberg gallery at Brussels and the Belvedere at Vienna.
HOBBES, Thomas (1583–1679), was born at Westport, adjoining (now forming part of) Malmesbury, in North Wilts, on Good Friday, the 5th of April 1588, brought prematurely into the world through his mother s fright at the rumours of the coming Spanish Armada. His father was vicar of Charlton and Westport, an illiterate and choleric man, who is said to have got into trouble later on by quarrelling with a rival at the church door, and been forced to decamp, leaving his three children (of whom Thomas was second) to the charitable care of an elder brother, a flourishing glover in Malmesbury. Hobbes was put to school at Westport church at the age of four, passed to the Malmesbury school at eight, and was taught again in Westport later, at a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, fresh from Oxford and "a good Grecian." He had begun Latin and Greek early, and under Latimer made such progress as to be able to translate the Medea of Euripides into Latin iambic verse before he was fourteen. About the age of fifteen he was sent to Oxford by his uncle and entered at Magdalen Hall, which had just been put on an independent footing, after being first a grammar school in connexion with the great foundation of Magdalen College and then governed as a hall by one of the college fellows. While Hobbes was there as a student the first principal of Magdalen Hall, Dr John Hussee, gave way to a second, Dr John Wilkinson, who is noted as having ruled strongly in the interest of the Calvinistic party in the university ; and this fact, with other circumstances in the Oxford life of the time, makes it not improbable that the destined foe of the Puritan Revolution was thus early led to mark the aggressive Puritan spirit. For the rest, Oxford did no more to train Hobbcs s mind for his future philosophical work than the decayed scholastic regimen of the universities in that age was able to do for any other of the active spirits that then began in different countries to open the modern era of thought and inquiry. We have from himself a lively record of his experience and pursuits as a student ( Vit. carm. exp., p. Ixxxv.),[1] which, though penned in extreme old age, may be taken as sufficiently trustworthy. In this he tells how he was set to learn " Barbara, Celarent," but, when he had slowly taken in the doctrine of figures and moods, he put it aside and would prove things only in his own way how he then heard about bodies as consisting of matter and form, as throwing off species of themselves for perception, and as moved by sympathies and antipathies, with much else of a like sort, all beyond his comprehension ; and how he therefore turned to things more congenial, took up his old books again, fed his mind on maps and charts of earth and sky, traced the sun in his path, followed Drake and Cavendish girdling the main, and gazed with delight upon pictured haunts of men and wonders of unknown lands. Very characteristic in this account is the interest in men and things, and the disposition to cut through questions in the schools after a trenchant fashion of his own. We may also believe that he was little attracted by the scholastic learning, and only should err if we took his words as evidence of a precocious insight into its weakness. The truth probably is that, finding himself left at Oxford very much to his own devices, he took no particular interest in studies which there was no risk in neglecting, and thought as little of rejecting as of accepting the traditional doctrines. He adds that he took his degree at the proper time ; but in fact, u^ton any computation and from whatever cause, he remained at Magdalen Hall five, instead of the required four, years, not being admitted as bachelor till February 5, 1608.
- ↑ There are three accounts of Hobbes s life, first published together in 1681, two years after his death, by R. B. (Richard Blaekbume, a friend of Hobbes s admirer, John Aubrey), and reprinted, with com plimentary verses by Cowley and others, at the beginning of Sir W. Molesworth s collection of the Latin Works: {!) T. H. Malmesb. Vita (pp, xiii.-xxi.), written by Hobbes himself, or (as also reported) by T. Rynier, at his dictation ; (2) Vitoc Hobbiancc Auctariwn (pp. xxii.-lxxx.), turned into Latin from Aubrey s English ; (3) T. II . Maimed). Vita carmine exyressa (pp. Ixxxi.-xcix.), written by Hobbes at the age of eighty-four (first published by itself in 1680). The Life of Mr T. H. of Malmcsburie, printed among the Lives of Eminent Men, in 1813, from Aubrey s papers in the Bodleian, &c. (vol. ii. pt. ii. pp. 593-637), contains some interesting particulars not found in the Auctarium.
