[Illustration: _The Grave of Hobbes of Malmesbury in Hault Hucknall Church._] The monument to this great “philosopher” and free-thinker is a plain slab of stone in the Hardwick Chapel—the raised slab shown on the floor in this engraving—which bears the following inscription:— CONDITA HIC SUNT OSSA THOMÆ HOBBES, MALMESBURIENSIS, QVI PER MULTOS ANNOS SERVIVIT DUOBUS DEVONIÆ COMITIBUS PATRI ET FILIO VIR PROBUS, ET FAMA ERUDITIONIS DOMI FORISQUE BENE COGNITUS OBIIT ANN^o DOMINI 1679, MENSIS DECEMBRIS DIE 4º ÆTATIS SUÆ 91. Before speaking of Hobbes and his connection with Hardwick, where he died, it will be well to note that the parish registers of Hault Hucknall commence in the year 1662, and that the entry regarding the burial of Hobbes, for the copy of which we have to express our thanks to the Rev. Henry Cottingham, the respected vicar of the parish, is as follows:— “Anno Regni } 31 Law. Waine, { James Hardwick, Caroli Sucund } _Vicar_. { Thomas Whitehead, Anno dom. 1679. _Churchwardens_. “Hardwick | Thomas Hobbs Magnus Philosophus, Sepul. fuit et affidavit in Lana Sepoliendo exhibit. Decem. 6” (or 8). Thomas Hobbes[28] was born at Malmesbury on Good Friday, 1588, in the year of “the Spanish Armada,” and it is said that his birth was hastened by his mother’s terror of the enemy’s fleet, and that a timidity with which through life he was afflicted was thus induced. He and fear, he was wont to say, “were born together.” His being born on Good Friday has also been turned to account in the way of accounting for his wonderful precocity as a child, and his subsequent intellectual progress. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Oxford, and there made such progress that before he was twenty years old he was taken into the service of Sir William Cavendish, who had a few years before been created Baron Cavendish of Hardwick, as tutor to his sons, Gilbert, who died before attaining his majority, and William, who became second Earl of Devonshire. With the latter young nobleman, who married, as already narrated, Christian, daughter of Lord Bruce, of Kinloss, Hobbes travelled through France and Italy. At his death he left, besides other issue, William, Lord Cavendish, who succeeded him as Earl of Devonshire, and who, at that time, was only in the tenth year of his age. This Lord Hardwick was, as his father had been before him, placed under the tuition of Hobbes, “who instructed him in the family for three years, and then, about 1634, travelled with him as his governor into France and Italy, with the longest stay in Paris for all the politer parts of breeding. He returned in 1637, and, when he soon after came of age, his mother (Christian, Countess of Devonshire), delivered up to him his great houses in Derbyshire all ready furnished.”