My personal memoir of smitty1e might be the only surviving reference to them, regarding their comment posting. In future times, some hypothesised person is going to memory-write in post-english emoji "yes, but did smitty1e really exist" and your status will continue purely on belief in my reference to you. Entire tribes of mind-readers will ponder: "did ggm lie, or did ggm really respond to this person? how can we know?"

Sure: they could have made it all up about Hobbes and Locke. Do you really think somebody would write in a basically private memoir "I remember seeing an edition of Hobbes by his bed in college even though he denied it" if it was all a fantasy?

What would motivate somebody to make up, connected, reasoned fundamental statements about the behaviour of a contemporary from personal memory?

I was at the University of York 79-82, and a british Comedian called Harry Enfield was also there. He was said to have kept a duck in a box under his bed and fed it weetbix. Now, go find any authoritative proof this really happened (asking Enfield himself is possibly cheating) -I defy you to find any written record this took place but I assure you, I will go to testimony on the stand about this, because I was there at the time and this story was notorious amongst a circuit in the colleges. Did he do it? Did he not do it? Did he only talk about it? Future Historians!

It strikes me as likely to add a footnote to the effect that Locke may have been more familiar with Hobbes than his works suggest, according to one anonymous contemporary who claimed to be a close associate. I doubt this will change anyone's understanding of his work in the least.

Yeah, it's a weak aspect of the confirmation bias we're all constantly subject to. If your story's relevance is amplified by the reported confidence, it makes sense to inflate one in hopes of inflating the other. Such is the world we live in, sadly.

Nonetheless, it's still interesting to learn there might be such a closer connection between Locke and Hobbes. The Fine Article indeed!

Unrelated, but I once came across a post claiming TFA stood for "the f**ing article", and I now can't unsee that. I wonder for a split second, before I remember what it actually stands for, why the poster is so angry.