The Civil War had broken out in 1642, and the royalist cause began to decline from the time of the defeat at Marston Moor, in the middle of 1644. Then commenced an exodus of the king's friends. Newcastle himself, who was a cousin of Hobbes's late patron and to whom he dedicated the "little treatise" of 1640, found his way to Paris, and was followed by a stream of fugitives, many of whom were known to Hobbes. The sight of these exiles made the political interest once more predominant in Hobbes, and before long the revived feeling issued in the formation of a new and important design. It first showed itself in the publication of the _De cive_, of which the fame, but only the fame, had extended beyond the inner circle of friends and critics who had copies of the original impression. Hobbes now entrusted it, early in 1646, to his admirer, the Frenchman Samuel de Sorbiere, by whom it was seen through the Elzevir press at Amsterdam in 1647--having previously inserted a number of notes in reply to objections, and also a striking preface, in the course of which he explained its relation to the other parts of the system not yet forthcoming, and the (political) occasion of its having been composed and being now published before them.[6] So hopeless, meanwhile, was he growing of being able to return home that, later on in the year, he was on the point of leaving Paris to take up his abode in the south with a French friend,[7] when he was engaged "by the month" as mathematical instructor to the young prince of Wales, who had come over from Jersey about the month of July. This engagement lasted nominally from 1646 to 1648 when Charles went to Holland. Thus thrown more than ever into the company of the exiled royalists, it was then, if not earlier, that he conceived his new design of bringing all his powers of thought and expression to bear upon the production of an English book that should set forth his whole theory of civil government in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war. The _De cive_, presently to be published, was written in Latin for the learned, and gave the political theory without its foundation in human nature. The unpublished treatise of 1640 contained all or nearly all that he had to tell concerning human nature, but was written before the terrible events of the last years had disclosed how men might still be urged by their anti-social passions back into the abyss of anarchy. There was need of an exposition at once comprehensive, incisive and popular. The State, it now seemed to Hobbes, might be regarded as a great artificial man or monster (_Leviathan_), composed of men, with a life that might be traced from its generation through human reason under pressure of human needs to its dissolution through civil strife proceeding from human passions. This, we may suppose, was the presiding conception from the first, but the design may have been variously modified in the three or four years of its execution.