the eighteenth century.-OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1885, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. II, p. 237.

BOYLE-BENTLEY CONTROVERSY

"A Short Review of the Controversy bewteen Mr. Boyle and Dr. Bentley," the author of which, I have no hesitation in believing, from the style as well as other evidence, to be Atterbury himself. The professed objects of the piece are, to apologize for Mr. Boyle, and to decry the presumption and ill-manners of his opponent: but from all questions of learning, the only objects in the controversy worth attention, it carefully abstains, and thereby conveys a tacit but perfect confession of Bentley's triumph. Though the style is caustic and polished, yet its general effect is feeble; being little more than a repetition of the criminating charges of Boyle's book, subdued and diluted by an unwilling moderation. Notwithstanding the popularity of Atterbury, this tract produced little or no sensation: in fact, it appears shortly after its birth to have sunk into oblivion. -MONK, JAMES HENRY, 1830, The Life of Richard Bentley, vol. I, p. 178.

Out came the reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth written by Atterbury, with the assistance of Smalridge and others. A most remarkable book it is, and often reminds us of Goldsmith's observation, that the French would be the best cooks in the world if they had any butcher's meat, for that they can make ten dishes out of a nettle top. It really deserves the praise, whatever that praise may be worth, of being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant. The learning of the confederacy is that of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and address of most able, artful, and experienced men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten times larger than it is. The dexterity with which they avoid grappling with those parts of the subject with which they know themselves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonderful.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1836, Sir William Temple, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

SERMONS

When Willis of Ephraim heard Rochester preach,

Thus Bentley said to him, "I pr'ythee, dear brother,

How likest thou this sermon? 'tis out of my reach."

"His is one way, (said Willis) and ours is another;

I care not for carping; but this I can tell, We preached very sadly, if he preaches well." PRIOR, MATTHEW, 1721? Doctors Differ, Epigram.

The day was so bad I could not even go to church here, so the Dean gave us prayers at home, and we read one of Atterbury's sermons; they are at present our Sunday reading, and charming sermons they are: I am not critic deep enough to find fault with them: his doctrine to me appears very good and his language elegant and pure.-DELANY, MRS. (MARY GRANVILLE), 1751, Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, vol. III, p. 37.

Sir John Pringle had expressed a wish that I would ask Dr. Johnson's opinion what were the best English sermons for style. "Atterbury?" Johnson: "Yes, Sir, one of the best."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1778, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. III, p. 281.

The Sermons of Atterbury attracted great attention from the first, and soon gave rise to controversies which we have merely time to refer to. Hoadley, Burnet, and Wake, were no mean antagonists, but our champion seems never to have been intimidated by numbers or awed by the fear of names.-ALLIBONE, S. AUSTIN, 1854-58, A Dictionary of English Literature, vol. 1, p. 80.

Reading the sermons in cold blood, and deprived of all the charm of delivery, we find them in substance wonderfully like other sermons of the time. The deists are refuted, and virtue is recommended in the ordinary method; though Hoadly discovered traces of the hated sacerdotal taint. The style is not unworthy of the friend and critic of the most brilliant writers of the day; and here and there, as in the sermon on the death of poor Lady Cutts, at the age of eighteen, the pathos has not entirely evaporated. But there are no traces of real power of thought or depth of emotion. They are the performances of a very able man, who is a politician before he is an

ecclesiastic, and a Tory more distinctly than a High-Churchman. In other times, Atterbury might have been a Laud or a Wolsey; in the eighteenth century his ambition could end only by sacrificing his talents and energy to the most contemptible of all pretenders. The spirit of the age enervates his religious thought as well as his political principles.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 345.

Unfortunately Atterbury's literary gifts, like his oratory, lack the merit of permanence, and his sermons, more conspicuous for eloquence than for the weightiness of matter, although extremely popular at the time, have long ceased to be read.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 207.

It is a great drop, say, from the sermons of Isaac Barrow to those of Francis Atterbury. OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1897, The Church in England, vol. II, p. 206.

GENERAL

Though Dr. Atterbury be a man of a very sharp pen, and of very quick parts, yet I do not look upon him to be a man of extraordinary depth. He has not a true genius to the study of antiquities; nor has he taken much pains to make himself a master of our English history. He may be cryed up for a master of style, and 'twill not be denyed; yet this however must be granted withall, that affectation of wit and satyr does not become a grave subject, and Mr. Hooker, bishop Sanderson, and others, are rather to be followed in such sort of writing; whilst the study of witty expressions is to be looked upon as levity, and more proper for juvenile essays. HEARNE, THOMAS, 1710-11, Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, ed. Bliss, Jan. 16, vol. I, p. 215.

Whose very considerable attainments

in classical scholarship were enlivened and decorated by the finest spirit of wit and humor.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 205.

His diction is not quite so pure as Swift's or Addison's; and it is easy in the sense of fluent and racy, not in the sense of languid.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 398.

On all quesitons pertaining to the niceties of criticism he was an unerring guide, for his judgment was clear and solid, his perception fine, and his taste pure even to fastidiousness. In no contemporary critic had Pope so much confidence.COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1893, Jonathan Swift, p. 96.

Atterbury's life was one too much engaged in ecclesiastical controversy, in political intrigue, and in schemes of personal ambition, to allow him much time for literature; and what he has left (beyond his correspondence) is small in bulk. But it may always be read with pleasure as the composition of one who studied minutely, and with an eye careful of effect, all the details of style, and the fundamental sincerity of whose nature, with its vivid contrasts of light and shadow, serves to give a certain picturesqueness and variety to his diction. But above all his letters are models of epistolary style.-CRAIK, HENRY, 1894, English Prose, vol. III, p. 459.

A brilliant and popular preacher, a pleasant letter-writer, a most dangerous controversialist and debater, and a good critic (though he made the usual mistakes of his age about poetry before Waller), Atterbury wrote in a style not very unlike Addison's, though inferior to it.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p, 542.

PERSONAL

He lived in obscure lodgings in London, and betook himself to the profession of physic, but was never able to acquire much practice. I once heard a London physician, who had married the daughter of one of that trade, mention him as a good sort of man, and one that he was acquainted with, and at the same time assert a fact, which I suppose he had learned from Mandeville, that the children of women addicted to dram-drinking, were never troubled with the rickets. He is said to have been coarse and overbearing in his manners where he durst be so; yet a great flatterer of some vulgar Dutch merchants, who allowed him a pension. This last information comes from a clerk of a city attorney, through whose hands. the money passed.-HAWKINS, SIR JOHN, 1787, Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 263, note.

FABLE OF THE BEES
1705-28

The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits.

I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago. He did not puzzle me; he opened my views into real life very much.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1778, Life, ed. Boswell.

With respect to his capital and offensive paradox, that private vices are public benefits, Mandeville's whole art consists in denominating our passions by the appellation assigned to their vicious excess, and then proving them, under this denomination, useful to society. There is a lively force, and caustic though coarse wit, in his performance, which occasionally reminds one of Paine. GREEN, THOMAS, 1779-1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature.

Mandeville was a man wholly destitute of morality, and without insight into the nature of man or the connexions between bodily and mental soundness and well-being. This book no man would now trouble himself to read.SCHLOSSER, FREIDRICH CHRISTOPH, 1823, History of the Eighteenth Century.

If Shakspeare had written a book on

But

the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in the "Fable of the Bees." could Mandeville have created an Iago? Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been able to consider those elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual man?-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1825, Milton, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

Though licentious, and in many respects objectionable, there are a great number of valuable remarks and of just and profound observations in this work, especially with reference to the improvement of arts and the increase of wealth.-MCCULLOCH, JOHN RAMSAY, 1845, Literature of Political Economy.

The book occasioned a great commotion; but it is now generally admitted that, whatever may be the worth, or worthlessness, of the philosophical system propounded in it, the author's object was not an immoral one. Independently altogether of its general principles and conclusions, the work is full both of curious matter and vigorous writing.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 253.

The work possesses no literary merit. -ANGUS, JOSEPH, 1865, The Handbook of English Literature, p. 509.

His humour is the coarsest of the coarse, but he cannot be denied great wit, happy expression, and ingenious illustrations. MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 401.

It represented strongly the increasing tendency to dwell upon the evils of society as a result of over-civilisation, and anticipated the teaching of those philosophers who saw no hope of a return to innocence but by returning to the state of nature. Mandeville argued, not, like Shaftesbury, that all is for good, but that the world is bad, and its whole civilisation

fed by evil appetites and evil deeds. The work was, indeed, a first sign of the strength of the reaction that gathered force year after year, until it struck on Europe with the shock of Revolution. But there was nothing in Bernard Mandeville of the fine yearning for a higher life that was to rise above the ruins of all that had been based on human wrong. was enough for him to maintain steadily that evil was man's good.-MORLEY, HENRY, 1880, ed., Shorter Works in English Prose, p. 253.

It

It would be a relief if we could look upon the work as an ironical satire upon the immorality of the age-a jeering exposure of the prevalent vicious practice by flaunting it in the outrageous extravagance of a theory; but the whole manner of the book, taken along with the appended "Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue," is incompatible with such a supposition. The author has, therefore, been generally and justly interpreted as maintaining desirously a doctrine which is in flagrant antagonism alike with all the history of political society, with the results of economical science, and with the high Hebrew morality on which Christianity founds the doctrine that the vices of individuals are economically beneficial to society, that it is unrighteousness that exalts a nation, while godliness is a reproach to any people.-MURRAY, J. CLARK, 1887, The Revived Study of Berkeley, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 56, p. 171.

Mandeville gave great offence by this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. It was long popular, and later critics have pointed out the real acuteness of the writer as well as the vigour of his style, especially remarkable in a foreigner. His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economical fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced "private vices," and assuming with the common view that wealth was a "public benefit," he easily showed that all civilisation implied the development of vicious propensities. He argued again with Hobbists that the origin of virtue was to be found in selfish and savage instincts, and vigorously attacked Shaftesbury's contrary theory of

a "moral sense." But he tacitly accepted Shaftesbury's inference that virtue so understood was a mere sham. He thus argued, in appearance at least, for the essential vileness of human nature; though his arguments may be regarded as partly ironical, or as a satire against the hypocrisies of an artficial society. In any case his appeal to facts, against the plausibilities of the opposite school, shows that he had many keen though imperfect previsions of later scientific views, both upon ethical and economical questions. Dr. Johnson was much impressed by the "Fable," which, he said, did not puzzle him, but "opened his views into real life very much."-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1893, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXXVI, p. 21.

The author of the "Fable of the Bees" writes coarsely for coarse readers, and the arguments by which he supports his graceless theory merit the infamy generally awarded to them.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 215.

GENERAL

Mandeville's satires, though general, frequently exhibit strong and lively pictures.-MILLS, ABRAHAM, 1851, The Literature and the Literary Men of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. II, p. 265.

Mandeville's object being chiefly negative and dialectical he has left little of positive ethical theory. Virtue he regards as de facto an arbitrary institution of society; what it ought to be, he hardly says, but the tendency of his writings is to make the good of the whole to be preferred to private interests. He denies the existence of a moral sense and of disinterestedness. The motive to observe moral rules is pride and vanity fomented by politicians. He does not regard virtue as an independent end, even by association, but considers that pride in its naked form is the ever present incentive to good conduct. BAIN, ALEXANDER, 1868-72, Moral Science, p. 183.

Mandeville is said to have been in the habit of frequenting coffee-houses, and amusing his patrons by ribald conversation. The tone of his writing harmonises with this account of his personal habits. He is a cynical and prurient writer, who seems to shrink from no jest, however scurrilous, and from no paradox, however grotesque, which is calculated to serve

the purpose, which he avows in his preface to be his sole purpose, of diverting his readers-readers, it may be added, not very scrupulous in their tastes. Mandeville shares Swift's contempt for the human race; but his contempt, instead of urging him to the borders of madness, merely finds vent in a horselaugh. He despises himself as well as his neighbours, and is content to be despicable. He is a scoffer, not a misanthrope. You are all Yahoos, he seems to say, and I am a Yahoo; and so-let us eat, drink, and be merry. Tell your fine stories to devotees or schoolgirls, he seems to say, but don't try to pass them off upon me, who have seen men and cities, and not taken my notions from books. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, pp. 33, 34.

-BROWNING, ROBERT, 1887, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, pp. 23, 26.

The "Fable of the Bees" which, with its more immediate appendices, contains almost everything of Mandeville's that is of importance to any but the curious, is one of those unlucky books which have become known to posterity chiefly by the polemical efforts of others to suppress them. . . His verse is very uncouth, and his prose is frequently incorrect and never in any way polished; but he makes up for this by many of the merits of Defoe, to whom in character as in period he is very close. Many of his characters -the special knack of the time-possess great felicity and truth of touch; his argument, sophistical as it commonly is, is put with a good deal of surface clearness and cogency; and his illustrations

and digressive passages have singular liveliness and force. And though

his sudden and not very savoury notoriety tempted him to indulge in long and dull dissertations where the merit of his style is spun too thin to cover the nakedness of his sophistry, he must still at his best remain a striking exemplar of one of the most nervous if not the most elegant periods of English writing, and deserve a place in the division of English prose history which includes Latimer and Bunyan, Defoe and Cobbett.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1894, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. III, pp. 438, 439.

A misanthropical Dutch doctor. Mandeville was a daring thinker, who permitted no traditional prejudice, no habit of decency, to interfere with the progression of his ideas. He was by far the ablest of the English deists, and though all the respectability of his time drew away from him, and voted him, like the grand jury of Middlesex, a public nuisance, he was not without his very distinct influence on the progress of English literature. He was an emancipator of thought, a rude and contemptuous critic of the conventions. In himself base and ugly for all his writings reveal a gross individuality the brute courage of Mandeville helped English speculation to slip from its fetters. His style is without elegance, but, what is strange in a foreigner, of a remarkable homeliness and picturesque vigour.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 225.

Mandeville is certainly not an innocent writer, but he has been considerably misunderstood both by his contemporaries and by modern critics. His business is the exposure of humbug and hypocrisy, and he does his work consistently and thoroughly, though he dips his pen in a very nasty mixture and carefully poses as a very disreputable person. His taste is as abominable as his style is effective. The essentially satirical character of his work is however concealed by his constant indulgence in paradox, a method which enables him to give a maximum of offence, while keeping in the back-ground a few unexceptionable principles to which he can apppeal in case of need.-SELBYBIGGE, L. A., 1897, ed., British Moralists, vol. I, Introduction, p. xv.