in Publow parish, although in Pensford village. In formal documents the Lockes are said to be "of Publow," in informal documents "of Pensford."

Some ten or eleven miles to the west of this locality, and about as far distant from Bristol, in a south-westerly direction, is the smaller village of Wrington, where in 1630 the elder John Locke was married to Agnes Keene. There, to the north of the church, and built up against the churchyard wall, is a small, thatched, two-storied house-the nearest to it of two that are set in one block-in which the young wife's grandfather had resided, and which was now occupied by one of her brothers.1 In this house John Locke was born on the 29th of August, 1632, and baptised on the same day.2

Of his early childhood we know nothing; but we may infer that it was passed mainly at Pensford, with occasional visits to Wrington, where his mother's kinsfolk resided, and where his father's sister Frances was living with her husband Edmund Keene, his uncle by the mother's side; and to Sutton Wick, nearly midway between Pensford and Wrington, where his grandfather

1 John at-Neale's Pedigree.

2 Wrington Parish Register; Shaftesbury Papers, series viii., no. 30. Tradition adds-perhaps because it was not thought quite satisfactory to connect such a great man's first appearance in the world with such "a small plain apartment, having few indications of former respectability" (Rutter, 'Delineations of Somerset,' p. xxii.)-that the occurrence in this place was accidental, as "the celebrated philosopher's mother, travelling in these parts, was here taken in labour, and constrained to take up her residence" (Collinson, History of Somerset,' vol. ii., p. 209). Edward Clarke reported, evidently in error, that Locke's mother, "intending to lie in at Wrington with her friends, was surprised on her way thither, and, putting into a little house on Broadwell Down, was delivered there" (Additional MSS., no. 4222).

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resided in the house of his second wife. Thomas, the only other child of John and Agnes Locke, was born at Pensford, and baptised on the 9th of August, 1637.1

After that event we lose trace of Locke's mother. All our information about her is contained in a single vague sentence, written long afterwards by Locke's most intimate friend during the last years of his life: "What I remember him to have said of his mother expressed her to be a very pious woman and affectionate mother." She probably died young, perhaps too early to leave any vivid impression on her son's memory. It may be assumed that she died before her husband made his will in 1660, as she is not named therein.

There can be little doubt, at any rate, that Locke held himself especially indebted to his father for the healthy influences that surrounded his childhood. "From Mr. Locke I have often heard of his father, that he was a man of parts," said the friend just quoted from. "Mr. Locke never mentioned him but with great respect and affection. His father used a conduct towards him when young that he often spoke of afterwards with great approbation. It was the being severe to him by keeping him in much awe and at a distance when he was a boy, but relaxing, still by degrees, of that severity as he grew up to be a man, till, he being become capable of it, he lived perfectly with him as a friend. And I remember he has told me that his father, after he was a man, solemnly asked his pardon for having struck him once in a passion when he was a boy." A parent who apologised for one such offence

3

1 Publow Parish Register.

2 MSS. in the Remonstrants' Library; Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc, 12 Jan. 1704-5.

3 Ibid. The reader will not fail to notice, in Locke's omission, in his re

would not be likely to have thus offended much more than once.

That Locke, when he was grown up, approved of the home discipline to which he had been subjected as a boy, is the best proof that the discipline, however severe it may have been, was not cruel. He generalised his own experience of parental treatment into a rule for all parents. "Those that intend ever to govern their children," he said, "should begin it whilst they are very little, and look that they perfectly comply with the will of their parents. Would you have your son obedient to you when past a child? Be sure, then, to establish the authority of a father as soon as he is capable of submission and can understand in whose power he is. If you would have him stand in awe of you, imprint it in his infancy, and, as he approaches more to a man, admit him nearer to your familiarity: so shall you have him your obedient subject, as is fit, whilst he is a child, and your affectionate friend when he is a man. For methinks they mightily misplace the treatment due to their children, who are indulgent and familiar when they are little, but severe to them, and keep them at a distance, when they are grown up. For liberty and indulgence can do no good to children; their want of judgment makes them stand in need of restraint and discipline. And, on the contrary, imperiousness and severity is but treating men who have reason of their own to guide them, unless you have a mind to make your children, when

an ill way of

mains, of all allusion to his mother, and in his approval of his father's educational method, the first indications of a curious parallelism, not constant, but often recurring, between the training and conditions of Locke's life, as well as his philosophical temper and work, and those of his great successor, John Stuart Mill-separated, of course, by nearly two centuries.

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grown up, weary of you, and secretly to say within themselves, 'When will you die, father?'" 1

The home duties of John Locke the elder were, as we have seen, seriously disturbed during his son's early boyhood. The disturbances, however, contributed in one respect at least to the lad's education. "I no sooner

perceived myself in the world," he wrote in 1660, “but I found myself in a storm which has lasted almost hitherto." 2 The storm began to show itself almost as soon as he could prattle. It raged fiercely all round Pensford, and swept past it more than once, during the years in which he was learning not only to write English and master the rudiments of Latin grammar, but also to begin thinking for himself, in boyish way, on some of the great questions of the time. Those questions must have been forced upon him, child as he was, by the fact that his father was now serving in the army that was setting Charles the First at defiance.

In 1646 he became a Westminster boy. How much schoolboy lore he acquired while he was at home or near it we do not know. It would seem that, before being admitted to Westminster, he must have received a better education than his father, even had he not been so busily engaged elsewhere, could himself have been able to give him; and, under ordinary conditions, we might fairly expect that he would have been sent for a few years, after he was ten or eleven, to Bristol Grammar School; but the disturbed state of Bristol at that time, violently seized and violently ruled by royalists till it was violently wrested from them, rendered that almost impossible.

1Some Thoughts concerning Education' (1692), § 40.

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2 Lord King, The Life of John Locke, with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals, and Common-place Books' (1829), p. 6.

If not in schoolboy lore, however, it is evident that in other ways he must have been carefully trained from infancy by his father, or by some one in a father's place. The rare modesty, gentleness and truthfulness of disposition and temperament for which he was remarkable all through his later life, the eager spirit of inquiry, the singular capacity of unbiassed judgment and the unvarying love of justice for which he was yet more remarkable, cannot but have grown from seeds planted while he was very young. Some millions of children may have had quite as good early training as was received by John Locke, without one of them growing to be such an one as John Locke was; but without good early training it is impossible that he could have grown to be what he became.

It was through the influence of Colonel Alexander Popham that young Locke was admitted to Westminster School. The date is not recorded, but it can be inferred with some certainty. As the statutes of the school direct that no boy shall be elected a king's scholar after the age of fifteen, he cannot-unless the irregularities incident to the civil war rendered possible an exception to the rulehave been thus elected later than 1647; and, as no boy can be placed on the foundation before he has been at least a year in the school, he cannot have entered it after 1646. But he is not likely, especially at the instance of Colonel Popham, to have been admitted before that year. In the earlier period of the civil war the dean and chapter of Westminster had so stoutly committed themselves to the royalist cause, that, when the Roundheads

1 Additional MSS., no. 4222.