nature only by observing and experimenting, people began to hold that Plato was wrong in saying that we brought certain knowledge and ideas of good and the beautiful into the world with us, and that we had no knowledge but what we gained by experience.

2. One of the wisest men of the time wrote a good deal about these matters. His name was JOHN LOCKE. He was born ten years before the Civil War broke out, just when Charles the First was provoking his subjects by breaking the laws of the country, which he should have obeyed as well as they. So even as a little boy Locke would hear such things talked about as the trial of Hampden1 for refusing to pay shipmoney; as the departure of the Puritans for America in the Mayflower; as the refusal of the Scottish people to use the English Prayer-book. Then the little boy would ask why his father left home to go and fight for Parliament against the king, so that he would begin early to think about the rights of the people and the rights of kings. When he left Westminster School and went to Oxford, he read Bacon's works, and began to try Bacon's new plan of getting knowledge by observation and experiment in the natural sciences, which he studied in order to become a physician.

3. Locke was not a physician for very long, as one of his patients (a nobleman, who afterwards became Earl of Shaftesbury) advised him to give up physic and take to politics. So, although he was always fond of natural science, and became a member of the Royal Society,2 Locke gave up his practice as a doctor and went to live with his friend and take charge of the education of Lord Ashley's only son. When Lord Shaftesbury was banished from England for proposing that James, Duke of York, should not be made king, Locke went with his friend and patron to Holland, and remained there even after Lord Shaftesbury died, until William the Third came to the throne,

1 Hampden, John, a famous English the promotion of mathematical and phypatriot. Born 1594; died 1643. "Ship- sical science. money was a tax levied by the king for the alleged maintenance of his navy.

2 Royal Society, founded in 1660, for

3 Lord Ashley. He became Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672.

when he returned to his native land in one of the ships `sent to bring over Queen Mary. He was given a government office, and lived very happily with some kind, clever friends in Essex.

4. While he was in Holland, Locke had written some Latin Letters concerning Toleration, showing that the rule of Christ's Church should be love, and not sameness of opinion. He said no Church was entitled to persecute people and deny them the right of worshipping God as they pleased. While he was living in Essex, Locke wrote an answer to a book published by the followers of James the Second. Of course, these people wanted James still to be king, and wrote saying that God gave the king his power, just as he gave a father the right to rule his children, and that the people could not take it away. Locke answered this, and wrote some other works about government, showing that no government or king had the right to tax people without their consent, as that was taking their property from them.

5. About that time Locke finished a great work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, which he had begun to write in Holland. In it he tried to show that there were some things about which we could never be quite certain, and it was better not to discuss them. He did not think, like Plato, that we brought ideas into the world with us, but held that all our knowledge was got by our senses, or gained for us by other people in the same way; and by thinking on these things the mind could get new ideas, but not certain knowledge. Even our knowledge of God is, he said, got in this way from the wonders and wisdom of the world around us. In the last years

of his life Locke gave up his government office, and spent much time earnestly studying the Bible, which he believed to be God's own revelation. He wrote a work on Christianity, and another on St. Paul's Epistles.

6. Meanwhile another patient worker was following Bacon's method, and studying nature by experiment. This was SIR ISAAC NEWTON. He was born ten years after Locke - the year the Civil War broke out (1642). He studied mathe

matics at Cambridge, and made a great many useful discoveries about finding out the distances and measuring the movements of the heavenly bodies. He also used to make lenses; and one day, when looking at the colours of light passing through a prism, he discovered that a beam of light is composed of seven different colours. If you look at light through a prism you will see that this is true.

7. But Newton's great discovery was that of the law of gravitation, which means that all larger bodies draw smaller ones to themselves. That is why an apple falls to the ground, unless it is attached in some way so as not to fall. Indeed, it is said that it was while sitting in an orchard and seeing an apple fall to the ground that Newton first thought of the law. Newton's great work was written in Latin. Its English title is, The Principles of Natural Philosophy. He also wrote a work on light; and after his death a book on the prophecies of Holy Scripture was published from notes he had made in his diligent Bible-reading. Both he and Locke were earnest students of the Bible. Though Newton was such a very wise and clever man, yet he was very humble, as all really wise men are, and at his death he said, "To myself I seem to have been as a child picking up stones on the sea-shore, while the great ocean of truth lay unexplored before me." What he meant was that all his discoveries and knowledge were very small compared with all that was to be discovered and known.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE AUTHOR OF "ROBINSON CRUSOE."

1. Since peace had been restored in England, and the great struggle for religious and political freedom was over, there was less of the strong feeling on great questions that there had been. There were still two parties in England-the one wanting to change many things which they did not think

right; the other, afraid that by these changes the good things they already had might be lost. The party all for change were named at first Whigs, and called those who objected to change, Tories. In our days we call the Whigs Liberals, the Tories Conservatives. There was still plenty of excitement between the two parties, but not of so deep a kind as in the days of the Civil War; and this feeling did not express itself in poetry, but in short, bright, clever prose papers or essays. The French had first started the fashion of that kind of literature, and it was brought over to England along with the other foreign fashions of the time.

2. One of the cleverest of these writers was DANIEL DEFOE. In the year 1703, a proclamation appeared offering a reward of £50 to any one who could find a "middle-sized spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown hair (but wears a wig); a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." No one got the reward, for the middle-sized spare man came out of hiding and gave himself up to justice. Who was he, do you think? He was Daniel Defoe, the writer of a book most of you know-Robinson Crusoe. What had he been doing to get himself advertised for, and, when he gave himself up, fined, pilloried,1 and imprisoned in Newgate? He had written a bold but very clever pamphlet showing how useless it was to try to force all the people of Britain into one Church. Why, he said, the shortest way with the Dissenters (and that was the name he gave his pamphlet) was to send them all out of the country, and hang all their ministers: then you would have everybody in England belonging to one Church. Of course, he was not in earnest, because he was a Dissenter himself; but both the Dissenters and the Church people thought he was, and when the Church party found out that he was only making fun of them, they were so angry that they managed to get him imprisoned.

3. You can see that Defoe must have been a very fearless

1 Pilloried, punished with the pillory, which was a wooden frame erected in a public place, with holes in it, through

which the head and hands of a criminal were put.

man, first to write such a book, and then to give himself up because he heard they had imprisoned the poor man who printed his book. He was fearless all through his life-this first great English novelist of ours. He was the son of a London butcher, and was born the year after Charles the Second was restored to the throne-that is, in 1661. He received a good education from a friend of his, a gentleman who seems to have seen he was a clever boy. When he grew up he fought for the Duke of Monmouth at Sedgemoor; and after the battle he escaped and spent two years in Spain and Portugal. When he came back he found that James the Second was king, and was setting aside the laws of England to benefit the Roman Catholics. Defoe at once boldly wrote against this, as he would against whatever he thought wrong and unjust.

4. He married, and took to business in London; but after a time he went to Bristol and tried business there. It was there he wrote what he called an Essay on Projects, which, like Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," proposes a great many things which