The Life of John Locke

large quantity of his correspondence and memoranda, apparently lost sight of by him during the political turmoil that caused him to take shelter in Holland, was mixed up with the Shaftesbury Papers. Besides

a great many letters written by and to him throughout the middle period of his life, and numerous other papers illustrating his career before and during that period, I have found in this collection the originals, in his handwriting, of several important essays and fragments of essays on political, religious, medical and other topics. As these documents, along with all the others inherited by the present Earl of Shaftesbury, have been generously placed by him at the disposal of all inquirers, and are now in the custody of the deputy keeper of the Public Records, I have been able to examine them much more easily and thoroughly than might have been possible had they remained, as formerly, at St. Giles's House.

I have made prolonged and careful search among the State Papers, both Domestic and Foreign, in the Public Record Office, and have extracted therefrom some material of value; but my examination of those collections has been far less successful than I had hoped that it would be. From some miscellaneous collections in the Record Office, however, especially from the old Board of Trade Papers, I have obtained a great deal of information about Locke and his work as the most energetic of William the Third's commissioners of trade.

Some of the manuscripts by and concerning Locke in the library of the British Museum have already been printed; but by far the larger portion have never yet been made public, or, as far as I know, referred to in any publication, and they have therefore been quite new material for my work. Among these may be enumerated several documents elucidating Locke's family history, and, more slightly, his own early life, a collection of medical notes made by him, a volume containing his journal for one year, and a great number of letters written during the last thirty-five years of his career.

From the Bodleian Library and the records of Christ Church, Oxford, from the Lambeth Library, and from other public collections, I have derived much valuable matter; and many documents of great interest have been kindly placed at my disposal by their possessors in various parts of the country.

In the Remonstrants' Library at Amsterdam I had access to a large and very important collection of Locke's correspondence with friends in that city. Thence I have obtained thirty-five new letters, and have recovered a great number of paragraphs omitted, because of their personal nature, from the published correspondence between Locke and Limborch which is contained in Some Familiar Letters.' 6 It will be readily understood that, though immediately after Locke's death these paragraphs were excluded as trivial in comparison with the theological and philo

sophical discussions that form the staple of this correspondence, they are now of special value to a biographer. At Amsterdam I also discovered a great many letters containing interesting references to Locke and illustrations of his life in Holland, the most important of all these latter documents being Lady Masham's long letter, telling all she knew or cared to tell about her friend, which furnished most of the material of Le Clerc's 'Eloge.' This letter, much more naïve and graphic in its original English than Le Clerc's French translation, and containing some passages that Le Clerc did not translate, supersedes the 'Eloge,' and is so interesting that nearly the whole of it has been copied at intervals into these volumes.

Finally, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Alexander Burrell, who has placed in my hands copious notes and extracts from parish registers and various other local sources of information, collected by him during his pilgrimages to the haunts of Locke, both in England and on the continent.

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