[5] The book, of which the copies are rare (one in Dr Williams’s library in London and one in the Bodleian), was printed in quarto size (Paris, 1642), with a pictorial title-page (not afterwards reproduced) of scenes and figures illustrating its three divisions, “Libertas,” “Imperium,” “Religio.” The title Elementorum philosophiae sectio tertia, De Cive, expresses its relation to the unwritten sections, which also comes out in one or two back-references in the text.
[6] L.W. ii. 133-134. In this first public edition (12mo), the title was changed to Elementa philosophica de cive, the references in the text to the previous sections being omitted. The date of the dedication to the young earl of Devonshire was altered from 1641 to 1646.
[7] Described as “nobilis Languedocianus” in Vit.; doubtless the same with the “Dominus Verdusius, nobilis Aquitanus,” to whom was dedicated the Exam. et emend. math. hod. (L.W. iv.) in 1660. Du Verdus was one of Hobbes’s profoundest admirers and most frequent correspondents in later years; there are many of his letters among Hobbes’s papers at Hardwick.
[8] The Human Nature corresponds with cc. i.-xiii. of the first part of the original treatise. The remaining six chapters of the part stand now as Part I. of the De Corpore Politico. Part II. of the D.C.P. corresponds with the original second part of the whole work.
[9] At the beginning of this year he wrote and published in Paris a letter on the nature and conditions of poetry, chiefly epic, in answer to an appeal to his judgment made in the preface to Sir W. Davenant’s heroic poem, Gondibert (E.W. iv. 441-458). The letter is dated Jan. 10, 1650 (1650/1).
[10] This presentation copy, so described by Clarendon (Survey of the Leviathan, 1676, p. 8), is doubtless the beautifully written and finely bound MS. now to be found in the British Museum (Egerton MSS. 1910).
[11] During all the time he was abroad he had continued to receive from his patron a yearly pension of £80, and they remained in steady, correspondence. The earl, having sided with the king in 1642, was declared unfit to sit in the House of Peers, and though, by submission to Parliament, he recovered his estates when they were sequestered later on, he did not sit again till 1660. Among Hobbes’s friends at this time are specially mentioned John Selden and William Harvey, who left him a legacy of £10. According to Aubrey, Selden left him an equal bequest, but this seems to be a mistake. Harvey (not Bacon) is the only Englishman he mentions in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the De corpore, among the founders, before himself, of the new natural philosophy.
[12] The treatise bore the date, “Rouen, Aug. 20, 1652,” but it should have been 1646, as afterwards explained by Hobbes himself (E.W. v. 25).
[13] “The Vit. auct. refers to 1676, a ‘Letter to William duke of Newcastle on the Controversy about Liberty and Necessity, held with Benjamin Laney, bishop of Ely.’ In that year there did appear a (confused) little tract written by Laney against Hobbes’s concluding statement of his own ‘Opinion’ in the ‘Liberty and Necessity’ of 1654 (1646), but I can find no trace of any further writing by Hobbes on the subject” (G. Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 202).
[14] This translation, Concerning Body, though not made by Hobbes, was revised by him; but it is far from accurate, and not seldom, at critical places (e.g. c. vi. § 2), quite misleading. Philosophical citations from the De corpore should always be made in the original Latin. Molesworth reprints the Latin, not from the first edition of 1655, but from the modified edition of 1668—modified, in the mathematical chapters, in general (not exact) keeping with the English edition of 1656. The Vindex episode, referred to in the Six Lessons, becomes intelligible only by going beyond Molesworth to the original Latin edition of 1655.