594 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
derived from classical authors, ‘He that would see,’ he says,' ‘what force 
education, lawes, and customes have to change nature, let him look into the 
people of Germanie, who in the time of Tacitus the Proconsull had neither 
lawes, religion, knowledge, nor any forme of a Commonweale ; whereas now they 
seeme to exceed other nations in goodlie cities and well peopled; in arms, 
varieties of arts, and civil discipline.’ A curious exception goes far to establish 
this rule. The only instance which I can recall, in which Bodin refers to an 
event in Negro-land, is where he illustrates the revolt of the Mombottu Negroes 
against the Moors in 1526 (p. 555); but this was an event, the news of which 
certainly reached Europe by way of the Morocco ports, not by way of the 
southern route, or westward down the Gambia; it was also one which made 
a great sensation in Hurope, and was still a commonplace of cosmographers 
and moralists a generation later. In illustration of this I quote as follows from 
Peter Heylin’s ‘ Microcosmus’*: ‘The last Moroccan governor, Soui Halin, 
was slaine by Ischia, Anno 1526, and the negroes againe recovered their long 
lost liberty: instituting divers kings, and among others, Ischia was worthily 
made king of Tombutum. After this advancement, he quickly united many 
of the weaker kingdoms to his owne, which at this day is the greatest of the 
foure in whose hands kingly authority remaineth.’ This actual example of a 
‘Leviathan’ in process of construction was thus in text-book use in 1577, a 
generation before the time of Hobbes. 
Shakespeare’s Caliban. 
The trend of popular opinion at the end of the sixteenth century, as to the 
characteristics of the state of nature, could hardly be better illustrated than 
by the Shakespearean conception of Caliban, ‘solitary, nasty, and brutish’ ; 
barely human, in fact, but for his vices; living ‘ like a bear’ (as Montesquieu 
so often puts it), grubbing roots and plundering bees’ nests; a prey to panic, 
haunted by the spirit of the power of the air, and instinctively appeasing him, 
as savages do, by abstinence, abasement, and offerings. Mr. Hartland has only 
lately called attention again to the truth of detail with which Caliban is portrayed, 
and Mr. Sidney Lee has gone at some length into the question of his probable 
originals. No doubt there is in Caliban-a touch of the gorilla pure and simple ; 
and a touch of the gorilla’s own brother, the ‘Salvage Man’ of heraldry and 
medieval legend; Linnzeus and Blumenbach, in fact, quote several examples 
of such ‘ wild men of the woods’ who had been captured in various parts of 
Europe, and described in books before Shakespeare’s time. But apart from 
his make-up—which, in the Globe Theatre (as at Her Majesty’s), was mainly 
to tickle the gallery—Caliban is certainly neither ape nor idiot. He has his own 
code of conduct (when he can bring himself to conform to it); he knows when 
he has done wrong ; and in his treatment of his invaders, of his small belongings, 
and in particular of his island property, he corresponds too closely with the 
current sixteenth-century descriptions of the feckless, passionate ‘child of 
nature’ to be set down as anything else but an experiment in the portrayal of 
natural man. And if we once view Caliban from this standpoint, it becomes 
almost incredible that he should have preceded Hobbes’ sketch of the state 
of nature by nearly half a century, unless Hobbes’ portrait itself was based 
upon a type already widely current, and generally accepted in popular belief. 
Edward Grimstone, 1615. 
I come now to a work of which I would gladly have further information. 
It is entitled ‘The Estates, Empires, and Principallities of the World’; it was 
published in London in 1615, and it is described as having been ‘ translated 
out of the French by Edward Grimstone,’ doubtless the translator of Joseph 
Acosta (1604) and Jean Frangois Le Petit (1608). I introduce this work here 
for three reasons. It contains a fuller application of what I shall best summarise 
as Baconian methods to political science than is easily to be found elsewhere. 
1 Loe. cit., English Hd., 1605, p. 565. 
2 I quote the Oxford edition of 1636, p. 722. 
