wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without conversing of their common master.  How rapidly the doctrine spread we learn from a letter of Bayle’s in which, as early as 1693, Locke has already became “the gospel of the Protestants.”  Nor was his immediate influence confined to England.  French Huguenots and the Dutch drew naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as Locke.  The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused counsel admitted the legality of James’ deposition in his speech for the defence.

[Footnote 9:  Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.]

More valuable testimony is not wanting.  In the Spectator, on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a national glory.  Defoe in his Original Power of the People of England made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his acknowledgments to his master.  Even the malignant genius of Swift softened his hate to find the epithet “judicious” for one in whose doctrines he can have found no comfort.  Pope summarized his teaching in the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it.  Hoadly, in his Original and Institution of Civil Government, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal the care with which the Second Treatise had also been pillaged.  Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the field he considered his own to call him, in that Divine Legation which he considered his masterpiece, “the honor of this age and the instructor of the future”; but since Warburton’s attack on the High Church theory is at every point Locke’s argument, he may have considered this self-eulogy instead of tribute.  Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book.  And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke’s economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the Craftsman, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole.  That is irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons.  There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke’s separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch.  The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than his own.  The authors of the Declaration of Independence had still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention.  Yet Locke’s own weapons were