So wrote the auctioneer Millington, or his phrasemonger, to advertise the sale of George Lawson's books in 1681. It is a pity the pen was stopped and intentions superceded, for within twenty years this man of such learning and esteem was to fall into an obscurity from which only the assiduous ink dippings of the twentieth century have begun, somewhat by accident, to rescue him.

If it was assumed familiarity with Lawson that really stopped the moving pen, it is symptomatic of Lawson's seventeenth-century fate. The apparent dissemination of his ideas and the affirmations of his importance are noticeably discrepant with the willingness of others to enlarge upon him or his work. As we shall see, Baxter, especially, claims he thought highly of Lawson and so did his more politically active friend John Humfrey. Locke certainly knew his work, may well have used it and, implicitly, criticised it; Defoe, as others certainly did, may have paraphrased and popularised it.