The origin of his taste for mathematics was purely accidental: begun in love, it continued to dotage. According to Aubrey, he was forty years old when, “being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open at the 47th Propos. lib. i., which, having read, he swore ‘This is impossible!’ He read the demonstration, which referred him back to another—at length he was convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. I have heard Mr. Hobbes say that he was wont to draw lines on his thighs and on the sheets a-bed.”
The author of the excellent Latin grammar of the English language, so useful to every student in Europe, of which work that singular patriot, Thomas Hollis, printed an edition, to present to all the learned Institutions of Europe. Henry Stubbe, the celebrated physician of Warwick, to whom the reader has been introduced, joined, for he loved a quarrel, in the present controversy, when it involved philosophical matters, siding with Hobbes, because he hated Wallis. In his “Oneirocritica, or an Exact Account of the Grammatical Parts of this Controversy,” he draws a strong character of Wallis, who was indeed a great mathematician, and one of the most extraordinary decypherers of letters; for perhaps no new system of character could be invented for which he could not make a key; by which means he had rendered the most important services to the Parliament. Stubbe quaintly describes him as “the sub-scribe to the tribe of Adoniram” (i.e. Adoniram Byfield, who, with this cant name, was scribe to the fanatical Assembly of Divines), and “as the glory and pride of the Presbyterian faction.”
Dr. Seth Ward, after the Restoration made Bishop of Salisbury, said, some years before this event was expected, that “he had rather be the author of one of Hobbes’s books than be king of England.” But afterwards he seemed not a little inclined to cry out Crucifige! He who, to one of these books, the admirable treatise on “Human Nature,” had prefixed one of the highest panegyrics Hobbes could receive!—Athen. Oxon. vol. ii. p. 647.
It is mortifying to read such language between two mathematicians, in the calm inquiries of square roots, and the finding of mean proportionals between two straight lines. I wish the example may prove a warning. Wallis thus opens on Hobbes:—“It seems, Mr. Hobbs, that you have a mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too old to learn, though you have as much need as those that be younger, and yet will think much to be whipped.
“What moved you to say your lessons in English, when the books against which you do chiefly intend them were written in Latin? Was it chiefly for the perfecting your natural rhetoric whenever you thought it convenient to repair to Billingsgate?—You found that the oyster-women could not teach you to rail in Latin. Now you can, upon all occasion, or without occasion, give the titles of fool, beast, ass, dog, &c., which I take to be but barking; and they are no better than a man might have at Billingsgate for a box o’ the ear.
“You tell us, ‘though the beasts that think our railing to be roaring have for a time admired us; yet now you have showed them our ears, they will be less affrighted.’ Sir, those persons (the professors themselves) needed not the sight of your ears, but could tell by the voice what kind of creature brayed in your books: you dared not have said this to their faces.”—He bitterly says of Hobbes, that “he is a man who is always writing what was answered before he had written.”