The only consequence that came of the parliamentary scare was that
Hobbes could never afterwards get permission to print anything on
subjects relating to human conduct. The collected edition of his Latin
works (in two quarto volumes) appeared at Amsterdam in 1668, because he
could not obtain the censor's licence for its publication at London,
Oxford or Cambridge. Other writings which he had finished, or on which
he must have been engaged about this time, were not made public till
after his death--the king apparently having made it the price of his
protection that no fresh provocation should be offered to the popular
sentiment. The most important of the works composed towards 1670, and
thus kept back, is the extremely spirited dialogue to which he gave the
title _Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England
and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the
year 1640 to the year 1660_.[21] To the same period probably belongs the
unfinished _Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common
Laws of England_ (_E.W._ vi. 1-160), a trenchant criticism of the
constitutional theory of English government as upheld by Coke. Aubrey
takes credit for having tried to induce Hobbes to write upon the subject
in 1664 by presenting him with a copy of Bacon's _Elements of the Laws
of England_, and though the attempt was then unsuccessful, Hobbes later
on took to studying the statute-book, with _Coke upon Littleton_. One
other posthumous production also (besides the tract on Heresy before
mentioned) may be referred to this, if not, as Aubrey suggests, an
earlier time--the two thousand and odd elegiac verses in which he gave
his view of ecclesiastical encroachment on the civil power; the quaint
verses, disposed in his now favourite dialogue-form, were first
published, nine years after his death, under the title _Historia
ecclesiastica_ (_L.W._ v. 341-408), with a preface by Thomas Rymer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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