With no small content I read Mr Hobbes' book De Cive, and his Leviathan, about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know, hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is.

would consider whether his building would not stand firmer upon the principles of regnum patrimoniale [a paternal kingdom], as he calls it, both according to Scripture and reason – since he confesseth the “father being before the institution of a commonwealth” was originally an “absolute' sovereign” “with power of life and death”, and that “a great family, as to the rights of sovereignty is a little monarchy.”