a disciple. The facts that he used to walk with Bacon at Gorhambury, and would jot down with exceptional intelligence the eager thinker's sudden "notions," and that he was employed to make the Latin version of some of the _Essays_, prove nothing when weighed against his own disregard of all Bacon's principles, and the other evidence that the impulse to independent thinking came to him not from Bacon, and not till some time after Bacon's death in 1626.[2] Philosophic Inquiry. So far as we have any positive evidence, it was not before the year 1629 that Hobbes entered on philosophical inquiry. Meanwhile a great change had been wrought in his circumstances. His friend and master, after about two years' tenure of the earldom of Devonshire, died of the plague in June 1628, and the affairs of the family were so disordered financially that the widowed countess was left with the task of righting them in the boyhood of the third earl. Hobbes went on for a time living in the household; but his services were no longer in demand, and, remaining inconsolable under his personal bereavement, he sought distraction, in 1629, in another engagement which took him abroad as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, of an old Nottinghamshire family. This, his second, sojourn abroad appears to have been spent chiefly in Paris, and the one important fact recorded of it is that he then first began to look into Euclid. The engagement came to an end in 1631, when he was recalled to train the young earl of Devonshire, now thirteen years old, son of his previous pupil. In the course of the next seven years in Derbyshire and abroad, Hobbes took his pupil over rhetoric,[3] logic, astronomy, and the principles of law, with other subjects. His mind was now full of the thought of motion in nature, and on the continent he sought out the philosophical speculators or scientific workers. In Florence in 1636 he saw Galileo, for whom he ever retained the warmest admiration, and spent eight months in daily converse with the members of a scientific circle in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne (q.v.). From that time (the winter of 1636-1637) he too, as he tells us, was numbered among philosophers.