It is now autumn, the grass is brown, the flowers and the maidens have departed, and the meadows are left to beweep their fate:
Like unthrifts, having spent
Your stock and needy grown,
You’re left here to lament
Your poor estates, alone.
The gentle suggestion that it is the meadows’ own fault (they have spent all their “stock,” all their capital), that they are now deserted where once they have been so rich, is the heartbreaking note of the poem. Indeed, it is not the meadows’ fault, it is the fault of the world itself, of things, of the conditions of life. But as we say that, as we defend the meadows from the charge that is implicit in those last lines, we come to understand the point Herrick is making. “Yes, you are right,” he nods, “it is not the fault of the meadows, it is the conditions of life and of man of which I am speaking here, and I am glad you have come to understand it.”
Here is a suggested list of poems by Herrick that I believe you should read: “The Argument of His Book,” “An Ode for Ben Jonson,” “To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses,” “To Daffodils,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “Sweet Disorder,” “Grace for a Child,” “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” “The Mad Maid’s Song,” “To Meadows,” “A Thanksgiving to God, for His House,” “His Litany, to the Holy Spirit,” and “To Death.” You may wish to read more, but these are often anthologized and are therefore fairly easy to find.
THOMAS HOBBES
1588–1679
Leviathan
In April 1588 rumors were rife in England concerning the approach of the dreaded Spanish Armada. Mrs. Hobbes, wife of the vicar of Westport, in Wiltshire, was beset with fears, as were all of her neighbors. She was pregnant, and because of her fear and distress she gave birth prematurely. The boy, Thomas, was not adversely affected, for he lived in good health and with the full possession of his faculties until the age of ninety-one.
He was slow to mature although he entered Oxford at fourteen, but he learned little or nothing, he later said, from the scholastic program based upon Aristotle that was offered there. Rather, he learned from other men, and not least from his friends and benefactors, the family of Cavendish, Earls and Dukes of Devonshire, with whom he was connected as tutor, fellow traveler, and companion throughout his long life.
It was as the companion of a nobleman that Hobbes found himself in Paris in 1628, when he was forty years old. There he came upon mathematics for the first time and a great revelation it was to him. His friend John Aubrey described it:
Being in a gentleman’s library … Euclid’s Elements lay open, and it was the 47th Prop. Lib. I. So he reads the proposition. “By G-,” says he, “this is impossible.” So he reads the demonstration, which referred him back to another, which he also read, and sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. That made him in love with geometry.
The forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid’s Elements is the famous Pythagorean Theorem, that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It is typical of Hobbes 1. that he had never heard of this geometric truth before; 2. that he crustily denied it until he had determined its truth with his own eyes and mind (in other words, he was distrustful of any intellectual authority); 3. that he did follow up the train of demonstration to its beginning, and was convinced by it; and 4. that he ever after loved “not the theorems,” as he said, “but the method of geometry, its art of reasoning.”
Crusty, stubborn, willful—that is Hobbes to a T. But these are not intellectual vices when combined with a good mind, much experience, and a long life. In fact, they then may turn into virtues, the fruit of which in Hobbes’s case was a number of works, one of which was the very important book, Leviathan. Its full title was Leviathan; or, the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.
The full title is both accurate and instructive. The book is in four parts, the last two of which are closely connected. The first part deals with the matter of a commonwealth, which is to say with human beings. The second part deals with the form of a commonwealth, the traditional differences in which—as between monarchy and democracy, say—Hobbes thought were trivial. The third and fourth parts deal with the vexing problem of the relations of the laws of man and of God in a commonwealth.
Ever mindful of the lessons of the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid, Hobbes begins his discourse with a presentation of his thoughts about first things: sense, imagination, speech, reasoning, and the like. In a series of short chapters, some of them no more than a paragraph in length, he offers the kinds of sound conclusions that are usually associated with the philosophical school of British Empiricism, of which he may be counted a founding member. He then goes on to examine man in his essence, without sentimentality. Mankind is physically weak but vain and full of desires, Hobbes says, which creates difficulties for him: he is a quarrelsome creature who always wants what he does not have. In the absence of law and government, this natural propensity leads to a condition of war, which is described by Hobbes in one of the most famous passages in the literature of political theory.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is
consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The last three adjectives only are usually quoted, which spoils the wonderful rhythm of the passage; and the word “nasty” is often misunderstood: in the seventeenth century it simply meant “dirty.”
Given these facts about the “state of nature,” it is not surprising, says Hobbes, that men everywhere are willing to give up their individual liberty for the sake of the security that a commonwealth alone can guarantee. They do this by handing over their individual sovereignties to a single sovereign, who may be an individual (a king) or a legislative body (a parliament).
This done, the multitude so united in one person is called COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.
Hobbes lived through troubled times, the English civil war (including the execution of King Charles I) and its aftermath. He was perhaps more willing, as a consequence, than he would have been in more peaceful circumstances, to give up all his sovereignty for the sake of security. He was also a stalwart Loyalist and follower of the King throughout the war. In any case, he did suppose that it was necessary to give up more sovereignty than it is. And the reason for this is that he did not see how sovereignty could reside in anything other than a person or persons. “That great LEVIATHAN,” he wrote, “… is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended.”