The number of wits and men of letters still hostile to the Protectorate to such a degree that they would undergo the hardships of exile rather than live in England was, it will have been observed, comparatively small. This arose from the fact that some who had been in exile at the death of Charles I, or even afterwards in the train of Charles II., had reluctantly lost faith in the possibility of a restoration of the Stuarts, and had returned to England, to join themselves with those whom we have classed generally as Cromwell's "subjects by compulsion." Leading cases were those of Hobbes, Sir William Davenant, and Abraham Cowley; with which, for convenience, may be associated that of the satirist Cleveland, though _he_ had never gone into exile, but had remained in England, taking the risks.--HOBBES, who had been in Paris since 1641, to be out of the bustle of the English confusions, but who had come into central connexion with the Stuart cause there by his appointment in 1646 to be tutor to young Charles, had been obliged to leave that connexion, ostensibly at least, in 1651 or 1652. The occasion is said to have been the publication of his _Leviathan_. That famous book of 1651, like its two predecessors of 1650, _Human Nature_ and _De Corpore Politico_, he had found it convenient to publish in London, where the Commonwealth authorities do not seem to have made the least objection. But by this time Hobbes's infidelity, or Atheism, or Hobbism, or whatever it was, had become a dreadful notoriety in the world; and, when Hobbes presented a fine copy of his great book to Charles II., that pious young prince had been instructed by the Royalist divines about him that it would not do to countenance either Mr. Hobbes or his books any longer. Charles retained privately all his own real regard for his old tutor, and Hobbes perfectly understood that; but the hint had been taken. Back in England at last, and permitted to live in the house of his old pupil and patron, the Earl of Devonshire, where his only annoyance was the society of the Earl's chaplain, Jasper Mayne, he had found the Protectorate comfortable enough for all his purposes, and had been publishing new books under it, including his pungent disputations with ex-Bishop Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity and with Wallis of Oxford on Mathematics.[1]--Hobbes's friend DAVENANT had for some time been less lucky. _His_ return to England had been involuntary. He had been captured at sea in 1650 on his way to Virginia (Vol. IV. p. 193), had been a prisoner in the Isle of Wight and in the Tower and in danger of trial for his life, and had been released only by strong intercession in his favour, in which Milton is thought to have helped. This result, however, had reconciled him, and Davenant too had become one of the subjects of the Protectorate. Nay he had struck out an ingenious mode of livelihood for himself under Cromwell, somewhat in his old line of business. "At that time,"