For some time Hobbes was not even allowed to utter a word of protest, whatever might be the occasion that his enemies took to triumph over him. In 1669 an unworthy follower--Daniel Scargil by name, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge--had to recant publicly and confess that his evil life had been the result of Hobbist doctrines. In 1674 John Fell, the dean of Christ Church, who bore the charges of the Latin translation of Anthony Wood's _History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford_ (1670), struck out all the complimentary epithets in the account of his life, and substituted very different ones; but this time the king did suffer him to defend himself by publishing a dignified letter (_Vit. Auct._ pp. xlvii.-l.), to which Fell replied by adding to the translation when it appeared a note full of the grossest insults. And, amid all his troubles, Hobbes was not without his consolations. No Englishman of that day stood in the same repute abroad, and foreigners, noble or learned, who came to England, never forgot to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect no progress of the years seemed able to quench. Among these was the grand-duke of Tuscany (Ferdinand II.), who took away some works and a portrait to adorn the Medicean library. His pastimes in the latest years were as singular as his labours. The autobiography in Latin verse, with its playful humour, occasional pathos and sublime self-complacency, was thrown off at the age of eighty-four. At eighty-five, in the year 1673, he sent forth a translation of four books of the _Odyssey_ (ix.-xii.) in rugged but not seldom happily turned English rhymes; and, when he found this _Voyage of Ulysses_ eagerly received, he had ready by 1675 a complete translation of both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ (_E.W._ x.), prefaced by a lively dissertation "Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem," showing his unabated interest in questions of literary style. After 1675, he passed his time at his patron's seats in Derbyshire, occupied to the last with intellectual work in the early morning and in the afternoon hours, which it had long been his habit to devote to thinking and to writing. Even as late as August 1679 he was promising his publisher "somewhat to print in English." The end came very soon afterwards. A suppression of urine in October, in spite of which he insisted upon being conveyed with the family from Chatsworth to Hardwick Hall towards the end of November, was followed by a paralytic stroke, under which he sank on the 4th of December, in his ninety-second year. He lies buried in the neighbouring church of Ault Hucknall. Personal characteristics.