Before the end, in 1650-1651, it is plain that he wrote in direct reference to the greatly changed aspect of affairs in England. The king being dead, and the royalist cause appearing to be hopelessly lost, he did not scruple, in closing the work with a general "Review and Conclusion," to raise the question of the subject's right to change allegiance when a former sovereign's power to protect was irrecoverably gone. Also he took advantage of the rule of the Commonwealth to indulge much more freely than he might have otherwise dared in rationalistic criticism of religious doctrines; while, amid the turmoil of sects, he could the more forcibly urge that the preservation of social order, when again firmly restored, must depend on the assumption by the civil power of the right to wield all sanctions, supernatural as well as natural, against the pretensions of any clergy, Catholic, Anglican or Presbyterian, to the exercise of an _imperium in imperio_. We know the _Leviathan_ only as it finally emerged from Hobbes's pen. During the years of its composition he remained in or near Paris, at first in attendance on his royal pupil, with whom he became a great favourite. In 1647 Hobbes was overtaken by a serious illness which disabled him for six months. Mersenne begged him not to die outside the Roman Catholic Church, but Hobbes said that he had already considered the matter sufficiently and afterwards took the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. On recovering from this illness, which nearly proved fatal, he resumed his literary task, and carried it steadily forward to completion by the year 1650, having also within the same time translated into English, with characteristic force of expression, his Latin treatise. Otherwise the only thing known (from one or two letters) of his life in those years is that from the year 1648 he had begun to think of returning home; he was then sixty and might well be weary of exile. When 1650 came, as if to prepare the way for the reception of his _magnum opus_, he allowed the publication of his earliest treatise, divided into two separate small volumes (_Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, E.W._ iv. 1-76, and _De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politic_, pp. 77-228).[8] In 1651[9] he published his translation of the De Cive under the title of _Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society_ (_E.W._ ii.). Meanwhile the printing of the greater work was proceeding, and finally it appeared about the middle of the same year, 1651, under the title of _Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil_ (_E.W._ iii.), with a quaint frontispiece in which, from behind hills overlooking a fair landscape of town and country, there towered the body (above the waist) of a crowned giant, made up of tiny figures of human beings and bearing sword and crozier in the two hands. It appeared, and soon its author was more