one famous station, and Hobbes's Leviathan," another.
Oceana," when published, was widely read and actively attacked.
One opponent of its doctrines was Dr. Henry Ferne, afterward
Bishop of Chester. Another was Matthew Wren, eldest son to the
Bishop of Ely. He was one of those who met for scientific research
at the house of Dr. Wilkins, and had, said Harrington, " an
excellent faculty of magnifying a louse and diminishing a
commonwealth."
In 1659, Harrington published an abridgment of his Oceana as
"The Art of Lawgiving," in three books. Other pieces followed, in
which he defended or developed his opinions. He again urged
them when Cromwell's Commonwealth was in its death-throes.
Then he fell back upon argument at nightly meetings of a Rota
Club which met in the New Palace Yard, Westminster. Milton's
old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was one of its members; and its
elections were by ballot, with rotation in the tenure of all offices.
The club was put an end to at the Restoration, when Harrington
retired to his study and amused himself by putting his " System of
Politics" into the form of " Aphorisms."
On December 28, 1661, James Harrington, then fifty years old,
was arrested and carried to the Tower as a traitor. His Aphorisms
were on his desk, and as they also were to be carried off, he asked
only that they might first be stitched together in their proper order.
Why he was arrested, he was not told. One of his sisters pleaded in
vain to the King. He was falsely accused of complicity in an
imaginary plot, of which nothing could be made by its
investigators. No heed was paid to the frank denials of a man of
the sincerest nature, who never had concealed his thoughts or
actions. "Why," he was asked, at his first examination by Lord
Lauderdale, who was one of his kinsmen, "why did he, as a private
man, meddle with politics? What had a private man to do with
government?" His answer was: "My lord, there is not any public
person, nor any magistrate, that has written on politics, worth a
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