At the end of Locke's life, a clerical admirer took down the great philosopher's ‘Extempore Advice’ about the reading for a ‘gentleman’. The guidance that Locke offered was interestingly shaped by social and political assumptions. A gentleman, he held, was a man

To be a gentleman, in fact, was properly to have a public function, but Locke's conception of the role left space for literary composition; he held that ‘the greatest part of [a gentleman's] business and usefulness in the world is by the influence of what he says or writes to others’. The writing of Two treatises was thus a form of gentlemanly action. So too, perhaps, if rather less directly, was the detailed under-labouring of An essay concerning human understanding, a work whose title page ascribed its author the needless honorific ‘John Locke, Gent.’ But at all events, the subject that he knew as ‘politics’ was manifestly central to a gentleman's concerns.

When the ‘Extempore Advice’ came to discuss the topic, it started by distinguishing two largely independent enterprises: ‘politics contains two parts very different the one from the other.