Some facts in the life of this great thinker and writer are worth our remembering, not only by reason of the fame of his books, but because in all those years whose turbulent rush and corrupting influences have shown themselves in our pages, John Locke lived an upright, manly, self-respecting life, though brought into intimate relations with many most prominent at court. He was born in Western England, north of the Mendip Hills; and after fourteen years of quiet country life, and kind parental training, among the orchard slopes of Somersetshire, went to Westminster School; was many years thereafter at Oxford; studied medicine; met Lord Ashley (afterward the great Shaftesbury--first party-leader in English parliamentary history), who was so taken by the pale, intellectual face of the young Doctor that he carried him off to London, and domiciled him in his great house upon the Strand. There Locke directed the studies of Ashley’s son; and presently--such was my Lord’s confidence in him--was solicited to find a wife for the young gentleman;[94] which he did, to the great acceptance of all parties, by taking him off into Rutlandshire, and introducing him to a pretty daughter of the Earl of Rutland. Fancy the author of an _Essay Concerning the Human Understanding_ setting off in a coach, with six long-tailed Flemish horses, for a four days’ journey into the north of England--with a young scion of the Ashleys--upon such an errand as that! Our doctors in metaphysics do not, I believe, engage in similar service; yet I suppose nice observation would disclose great and curious mental activities in the evolution of such schemes. The philosopher must have known Dryden, both being early members of the Royal Society; but I have a fancy that Locke was a man who did not--save on rarest occasions--take a pipe and a mug at such a place as Will’s Coffee-house. His tastes led him more to banquets at Exeter House. There was foreign travel, also, in which he accomplished himself in continental languages and socialities; he had offers of diplomatic preferment, but his doubtful health (always making him what over-well people call a fussy man) forbade acceptance; else we might have had in him another Sir William Temple. Shaftesbury interested him in his scheme of new planting the Carolina colony in America; and John Locke drew up rules for its political guidance. Some of these sound very drolly now. Thus--no man was to be a freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that he was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. The members of one church were not to molest or persecute those of another. Again, “no one shall be permitted to plead before a court of justice for money or reward.” What a howling desert this would make of most of our courts! Again, he writes with great zest upon the subject of Education, and almost with the warmth of that old Roger Ascham, whose maxims I cited in one of our earlier talks: