There was still living the philosopher of the epoch, Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, whose incisive sayings had for more than a generation set all minds fermenting. He had formerly devoted himself in Oxford, with as much zeal as any one else, to the scholastic doctrines as they were there taught, but later had entirely put them aside, at first during his travels on the Continent, where he thought he saw that the world was occupied with entirely different problems from those which were proposed in Oxford, and then after his return, by renewed study of the old classical literature, particularly the poets and historians. A decisive influence over his education was exercised by the political occurrences of the time. During many years he enjoyed the peace which Richelieu's supreme authority had produced, and the free literary intercourse which it favoured; he loved the intellectual atmosphere in which strangers moved in Paris. On his return to England, the first outbreak of the civil disturbances, which affected all men's thoughts and actions, terrified him and moved him to return to Paris. Between the opposite impressions of salutary repose under a monarchy, and wild civil war, caused by the attempt to limit the Prince's power, his theory about state power, I will not say originated, because it hangs together with all that he perceived and thought, but at least ripened and attained a form in which it could be expressed.