xviii The Duchess of Newcastle 



plainly enough. Hobbes of the Leviathan was a friend 

 of the Duke's, and visited at Welbeck, and in his 

 Decameron Physiologicum and elsewhere are chapters 

 such as that " Of Hard and Soft, and of the Atoms that 

 fly in the Air," which no doubt she had read and 

 pondered. A Treatise on Optics too is extant by Hobbes, 

 and in the course of the dedication to the Duke the 

 author says his pages are grounded upon ideas af&rmed 

 at Welbeck " about sixteen years since to your Lopp, — 

 that light is a fancy in the mind caused by motion in 

 the brain, which motion again is caused by the motion 

 of y^ parts of such bodies as we call lucid : such as are 

 the sun and y^ fixed stars, and such as here on earth is 

 fire." 



Hobbes was one of the contributors to the amazing 

 volume of high-flown eulogies addressed to the Duchess 

 by her friends and admirers; and in it he said her 

 writings had given him " more and truer ideas of virtue 

 and honour than any book of morality he had ever read." 

 This refers probably to Nature's Pictures ; and, for her 

 plays, " if some comique writer have been able to present 

 vices upon the stage more ridiculously and immodestly, 

 by which they take their rabble, I reckon that amongst 

 your praises. For that which most pleases lewd specta- 

 tors is nothing but subtile cheating or filch, which a high 

 and noble mind endued with virtue from its infancy can 

 never come to the knowledge of." (Feb. 9, 1661.) 



Actually, one must confess that her two books of plays 

 are likely to cause despair to the reader. But when he 

 has decided it is impossible to read them at any purchase, 

 he will find that the best of the number has at least an 

 interest that is auto-dramatic and personal. The first 

 collection of the plays is in the folio of 1662, which runs 

 to 679 pages and contains some thirteen of them, 

 chiefly comedies, and many of these in two parts. The 

 volume has a lavish set of dedicatory pages; — a general 

 dedication in verse which tells the pleasure she took in 

 play- writing: 



" For all the time my Playes a making were, 

 My brain the Stage, my thoughts were acting there; " 



