SOURCE: “Addison and Steele's Spectator: Towards a Reappraisal,” in Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1987, pp. 2-11.

[In this essay, Dwyer analyzes the moral perspective promulgated by Addison and Steele through the persona of Mr. Spectator. In response to the ethical confusion of English society, this character, Dwyer contends, “attempted to present virtue and contentment in a clearer, basically classical, light in the pages of his papers.”]

In an article written for Encounter twenty years ago, Peter Gay called for a greater appreciation of the role of the Spectator in early eighteenth-century British society.¹ He rightly pointed out that this daily publication was by far the most widely read of its day and, if the comments of contemporaries mean anything, it effected a quiet revolution in manners and morals. Such was the popularity of this series of morning lectures that its influence soon spread to the Continent, the Scottish lowlands, and as far away as the American colonies. Imitations of the Spectator sprang up in France, Germany, Holland and, a century later, even Hawaii.² One French historian was so impressed by the number of references to the Spectator in his own country that he suggested the writing of “un histoire des periodiques du type Spectator en Europe.”³ Another of his Scottish counterparts points to the relationship between the Spectatorial tradition and Enlightenment in North Britain.⁴ A German scholar has gone even further, maintaining that British periodicals in the style of the Spectator performed the critical cultural function of bridging the Enlightenment and the romantic movement.⁵

Contemporaries such as David Hume, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith were effusive in their praise of the Spectator. Johnson went so far as to claim that the Spectator was “an elevation of literary character, above all Greek, above all Roman fame.”⁶ Similar sentiments were echoed by his friend and biographer, James Boswell, who was forever attempting to put himself in an Addisonian frame of mind in the pages of his London Journal.⁷ Hugh Blair reserved high praise for the Spectator in his influential teaching tool, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783).⁸ Clearly, Mr Spectator was an intellectual force to be reckoned with throughout the century. As Jane Austen noted in Northanger Abbey, even when the style of literary composition had changed and the events and circumstances which he described were long past, Mr Spectator did not lose his appeal among serious-minded people.⁹

Thus, Peter Gay's cry for an analysis of the Spectator was, and still is, long overdue. What remains disputable, however, is whether Gay, or those who have followed his lead, have provided anything like a fitting framework for such a task. Gay argued that Mr Spectator's appeal must be understood in the context of a society rapidly moving from a God-ordained hierarchy to a purely secular state. If the rejection of the Christian system was not to result in a Hobbesian universe, a new code of morals had to replace it. Mr Spectator assigned himself to precisely this task and his popularity attests to the fact that many individuals were seeking a new moral and psychological understanding of themselves and their personal relationships. Peter Gay was not at all impartial about the historical significance of Mr Spectator's role: for him, Mr Spectator represented the voice of reason, humanity and experience. His opponent was medieval Christianity which was dogmatic, factious and backward looking. Mr Spectator was on the side of progress; he symbolized the optimism and humanity characteristic of a secular bourgeois society. Given the times in which he wrote, Gay argued, Mr Spectator's ideology was “rational, pacific and secular.” And, while his treatment of women was perhaps a trifle “condescending,” at least “condescension is better than brutality.”¹⁰

While Gay was undoubtedly correct in pointing to Addison's self-proclaimed function as a moralist during a period of social change, his picture is misleading in several respects. Mr Spectator was no pacifist. As much as he might decry the loss of young men on the battlefield, he was quite prepared to advocate the use of arms as a necessary instrument in the advancement of a country's trade. Nor was Mr Spectator a secularist. He repeatedly supported the claims of the established church; he wrote numerous articles on the existence of God; and he truly detested free thinkers and atheists. He cannot be construed as a bourgeois apologist. His attitude towards merchants and traders was ambivalent at best; he was arguably more concerned with the role of the landed gentry as symbolized by Sir Roger de Coverley.¹¹ Addison's treatment of women is far more complex than condescending. More than once, he emphasized the basic equality between men and women and posited the domestic hearth as a possible arena for heroic virtue (e.g. Spectator no. 11). No complacent optimist, Mr Spectator constantly reminded his readers that they could never be happy on earth, and that, without the hope of a heavenly reward, this existence would be a miserable one indeed.

If one is to truly appreciate the cultural significance of the Spectator, one must begin by casting off anachronistic assumptions about the rise of a humane and progressive bourgeois society and examine eighteenth-century discourse on its own terms. Mr Spectator typically claimed that his originality lay in his complete disassociation, not from the political world of his time, but from party politics.¹² This allowed him to assume the role of an impartial yet sympathetic observer of the human condition. His impartial view of the society in which he lived was far from sanguine. “The prospect of human misery struck me dumb,” wrote Steele. “Then it was that, to disburthen my Mind, I took Pen and Ink, and did every Thing that hath since happened under my Office of SPECTATOR.” (no. 604) He went on to describe human beings as anxious and unhappy creatures, whose expectations and hopes always exceeded their grasp. And, in another piece, he commented on how little of life, “this Vicissitude of Motion and Rest,” was spent in satisfaction (no. 143). Similarly, Addison began one of his essays by pointing out that man could do no more than make himself “easie” in this life. “Enquiries after Happiness, and Rules for attaining it,” he suggested, were “not so necessary and useful to Mankind as the Arts of Consolation and supporting oneself under Affliction” (nos. 163, 196).

Authors like Peter Gay, C S Lewis and Calhoun Winston are not mistaken in detecting a tone of optimism in many of Mr Spectator's essays; they have, however, misunderstood it. Although Addison and Steele believed they lived in uncertain and troubling times, they strove to inculcate a cheerful frame of mind which could both support the moral personality and contribute to the consolation of others. Thus, they condemned those “saints” who gave themselves up to grief and melancholy (no. 494). The melancholic person was not only uneasy in himself but became anti-social and incapable of performing a moral role with others. Mr Spectator therefore advised his readers to cultivate cheerfulness and, above all, to refrain from obtruding their “distresses,” “diseases,” “uneasiness” and “dislikes” upon their friends. Addison referred to cheerfulness as an indispensable “moral habit of the mind” and went on to say that “I must the more inculcate this Chearfulness of Temper, as it is a virtue which our Countrymen are observed to be more deficient than any other nation” (no. 387).

This inculcation of cheerfulness in a cheerless world was only a part of Mr Spectator's scheme for moral and psychological health. Central to this scheme and the sine qua non of his studied cheerfulness, was the doctrine of “ease.” This concept has never been fully appreciated by Mr Spectator's pro-bourgeois analysts. Edward and Lillian Bloom, for example, mistakenly equate ease with “prosperity” and/or “commercial well-being.”¹³ But such was not the case: according to Mr Spectator's use of the term, ease was a state of mind, not a material condition, and it could be attained by virtually anyone. The most accurate synonyms for ease, and the ones which were used most frequently, are “contentment” and “equanimity.” Such an habitual attitude related more to “allaying our Pain rather than promoting our Joy” (no. 196). “The lesson,” Steele continued, “is Aequanimity, a regularity of Spirit which is a little above Chearfulness and below Mirth.” Addison echoed Steele's words in one of his own essays wherein he argued that the great secret of life was nothing else but “Content” (no. 574).

The content which Mr Spectator exhorted did not derive from material well-being or enlightened optimism. Its critical characteristic was that self-composure or discipline which had its basis in the philosophy of the Stoics. Moreover, like the Stoics, Mr Spectator was concerned to incorporate his conclusions about contentment within a general theory of man and society. The passions or desires could never be “satisfied,” argued Mr Spectator; they caused men to be continually restless and miserable (nos. 501, 574, 575). Only if the passions were controlled by “reason” could easiness be attained. Mr Spectator defined reason in stoic terms as a “clear knowledge of the workings of human nature” and an “understanding of the laws of cause and effect.” Reason, he argued elsewhere, was that power of internal speech and idea of consequence or succession that allowed men to rise above their immediate feelings and hopes in order to view life as it really was—a mixture of pleasure and pain.¹⁴ Addison and Steele sometimes contrasted this concept of reason with “imagination” or that state of mind induced by an excessive enslavement to the passions. Imagination, claimed Addison, painted a world of “shadows and appearances” upon the mind; it caused men to “carry on an inordinate search after wealth, fame and honour” (no. 574). One could never be content or moral with such goals, only disappointed and impassioned.

The fact that such goals were becoming enshrined in the polite mores of an increasingly complex and differentiated civilization disturbed Mr Spectator. He continually attacked the new and fashionable social morality, calling for a redefinition of social ends in accordance with reason and morality proper. Both Addison and Steele were concerned to protect the individual's integrity in the “confused” and “phantastical” world of contemporary life. While they were far too practical to advocate the withdrawal of rational men to a hermitage, they consistently prescribed a measure of mental detachment from the social arena. Steele went so far as to suggest that the “best way of separating a man's self from the world, is to give up the desire of being known to it” (no. 264).

As appealing as the vision of solitary detachment could be to Mr Spectator, he never let his readers forget that they had a crucial role to play in the social arena. The individual's first duty was to himself, for unless a man was easy within himself he could not perform the moral function with regard to his fellows. But once the individual had achieved some degree of self-regulation according to the dictates of “cool reason,” it was his mandate as a “sociable animal” to do his utmost for the well-being of the community in which he lived. This ideal of social duty stands out very clearly in Mr Spectator's discusson of “virtue.” Both Addison and Steele attacked Aristotle for claiming that all morality could be reduced to self-interest. Instead, they posited the existence of a moral sense which indicated to men what was right and wrong. Paraphrasing Tully, Addison wrote: “We love a Virtuous Man … who lives in the remotest Parts of the Earth, tho' we are altogether out of reach of his Virtue, and we can receive from it no matter of benefit” (no. 243).

Not surprisingly, given his emphasis upon ease as a combination of rational thinking and self-control, Mr Spectator's treatment of virtue owed a great deal to his admired Stoics. It never failed to amaze Addison that these “heathen philosophers” demonstrated such an acute understanding of and respect for virtuous behaviour. In contrast, he pointed out, most modern writers were putting obstacles in the path of virtue. Mr Spectator's enemy was not so much medieval Christianity as that “hypocrisie” of fashionable society, which either obscured virtue or confused it with vice. Addison and Steele looked upon this moral hypocrisy as symptomatic of a corrupt and morally degenerate society and viewed it as one of their main tasks to counter this tendency of modern life by portraying virtue in its true colours. Their counter-attack, which was aimed particularly at Restoration playwrights, involved them in a particularly interesting analysis of the language of moral discourse. Addison and Steele's basic contention was that moral terms needed to be defined properly and used consistently. Words like “glory,” “honour,” “virtue,” “modesty,” and “good nature” were fundamentally ethical terms, they argued, and should only be used to classify moral behavior. When individuals attached amoral or immoral connotations to such words, the result was either confusion or hypocrisy. As Steele put it, modern “rougues” could label the “lazyest Creature in the World” as “strictly Virtuous”; the “Peevishest Hussy” had “Virtue without blemish”; those completely destitute of “Charity” were yet “rigidly virtuous” and every man who was not a “Coward” was a “Man of Honour” (no. 390, 139). Not only were indifferent or suspect characters given this pseudo-moral character, but, what was even worse in Mr Spectator's eyes, virtue was often confused with vice in the language of fashionable society. He frequently pointed to the pernicious influence of most modern plays, in which wisdom was portrayed as pedantry, piety as unsociability, and virtuous love as folly. Moreover, he labelled contemporary times in general as “a loose Age with a scandalous Representation of what is reputable among men” (no. 270).

Although Mr Spectator did not wish to turn back the clock, he was not at all complacent about the values of the society in which he lived. His intention was to teach mankind how to achieve an easy and virtuous existence despite the increasingly selfish, confused and phantastical nature of an intricate commercial empire. As the means to this end, he advocated a regular mental detachment from the social and fashionable round as well as a strict adherence to the lessons of reason and morality. His ideas, attitude, and use of moral terminology had particularly strong parallels with Stoic philosophy, and it is not surprising that Mr Spectator frequently referred to the writings of Epictetus and Seneca, or to those stoic doctrines contained in the works of Cicero. In essential respects the Spectator can be read as an attempt to contrast the ethical values of an humane Christian Stoic with those of the increasingly artificial and hollow role players who invaded the metropolitan centres. Charitable Stoicism provided an antidote to the publica mala and provided men with a framework for action in an increasingly confusing world.

While Mr Spectator professed himself to be an ardent admirer of the writings of the Stoics (nos. 179, 219), he disagreed with those philosophers on three essential issues: the role of the passions, the perfectability of men, and the capacity of philosophy to act as a sufficient guide to morality. The undercurrent of anxiety in the Spectator, as well as Addison and Steele's repeated emphasis upon the necessity for religious belief cannot be adequately grasped without reference to these three issues.

The Stoic philosophers called for the harmonization of the will with fortuna, and approximated Mr Spectator's doctrine of ease. As it applied to the individual as a member of a larger social unit, stoic ethics required the maximization of one's efforts for the good of the group, and corresponded closely to Mr Spectator's repeated emphasis on public duty. But Mr Spectator felt that the Stoics were too rigid in their demand that the passions should be subdued by reason. “The soul, considered abstractly from its Passions,” argued Mr Spectator, “is of a remiss and sedentary Nature … The use therefore of the Passions is to stir it up and put it upon action” (no. 255). The “Stoick philosophers” were too eager to “discard all Passions in general” (no. 397). For his part, Mr Spectator was of the opinion that the passions, particularly those social passions which caused men to identify with one another's grief, were critical to an active and virtuous life.

Thus, Mr Spectator labelled Stoicism as the “Pedantry of Virtue” (no. 274). For him, the pedant was the man who constructed a system from abstract concepts instead of adopting a flexible framework based upon real life observation (no. 105). Mr Spectator refused to live in such a cloud-cuckoo-land of logical abstractions. He especially disliked the Stoic pedant for “regarding all crimes alike” and not acting “like an impartial SPECTATOR who looks upon them with all the circumstances that diminish or enhance the Guilt” (no. 274). Moreover, Mr Spectator's ethical advice centred on a life of realistic moderation rather than an abstract devotion to reason and virtue. He advised individuals to avoid extremes and to “maintain the medium” (no. 150).

This being the case, Mr Spectator often relied on ethical antithesis to get across his point. While he emphasized the “phantastical” nature of wealth, he accepted its real importance in social life; he criticized those who sought excessive fame, but scorned men without ambition; he ridiculed “fops” and detested “slovens”; he rebuked the “splenic” and “melancholic” while recommending the subject of death as the most appropriate to meditation; he advocated temperance but decried “thrift” as the habit of petty minds; and he equally mistrusted the “merry” and the “dull.” “Temperance,” wrote Addison echoing the Stoics, was “the Means of Health” as well as “a Moral Virtue” (no. 195). Realist that he was, however, he recognized that “it is impossible for one who lives in the World to Diet himself always in so Philosophical a manner.” Therefore, he recommended days of abstinence, suited to the individual's constitution and timetable.

Unfortunately, as far as Mr Spectator was concerned, the practical advantages of his moral realism were not without their price. The language of virtue and the language of the passions were, at least on the face of things, somewhat incompatible. If one admitted the primacy of the passions and the inability of men to achieve an abstract concept of virtue, then one was forced to accept some logical problems which the Stoics had managed to avoid. Some of these were as follows. If man is basically a creature of passion, how can one talk in ethical terms at all? Exactly what is the status of passions if they can never be grafified? What is the precise function of the moral sense vis à vis the passions? How can a man hope to retain his moral integrity if he is programmed to act in an admittedly “phantastical” and “chimeral” world? Mr Spectator was too good a student of the classics to dismiss these as irrelevant questions.

Addison and Steele might perhaps have overcome such difficulties by affixing the concept of virtue more closely to the passions as, for example, Adam Smith would do in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Such a paradigmatic leap, however, they were not prepared to take. Instead they advocated a system of belief which reconciled men's feelings and desires with the necessity for more purely altruistic action. “It is the great Art and Secret of Christianity,” wrote Addison, “to manage our actions to the best Advantage, and direct them in such a manner, that everything we do may turn to account at that great Day, when everything we have done will be set before us” (no. 213). If the Stoics offered the sage a studied happiness only if he were able to subject his passions completely to the rules of reason, Christianity conformed more closely to the principles of human nature by offering man a future life in which all his hopes, curiosities and desires would be fulfilled. “There was never any System, besides that of Christianity,” claimed Mr Spectator, “which could effectively produce in the Mind of Man the Virtue I have been hitherto speaking of” (no. 574). Without religion, argued Steele, only a sage or an “Idiot” could pass away his days with a tolerable degree of patience (no. 143).

Mr Spectator repeatedly affirmed the correspondence between Christianity, man's self-love, and his compassion for others. Without the benefit of a belief in a future world of rewards and punishments, men would not only discover their most altruistic feelings to be meaningless but would be incapable of moral action. It was for precisely this reason that Mr Spectator detested that “monstrous species of men”—atheists. Steele and Addison's attitude towards both atheists and free thinkers stands out in clear relief from their treatment of any other social type; the mask of spectatorial impartiality is suddenly cast aside in favour of vicious polemic. Atheists are “monsters,” “gamesters,” “false zealots,” and “bigoted infidels.” They seem to have no human qualifications whatsoever. In reality, Mr Spectator was more afraid of the intellectual framework in which such men acted than he was an enemy of their “inverted” persons. According to his lights, it was inconceivable that a man could ever attain cheerfulness and equanimity without reference to a future state. As Addison himself put it: “How is it possible for a Man to be otherwise than uneasie in himself, who is in danger every Moment of losing his entire Existence, and dropping into nothing” (no. 381). The moral stance of atheists troubled Addison deeply: “I must confess I do not know how to trust a Man who believes neither Heaven nor Hell, or in other Words, a future state of Rewards and Punishments. Not only natural Self-love, but Reason directs us to promote our own Interests above all things” (186). Mr Spectator's religion was not that of a deist. While he seemed uncomfortable with biblical revelation, he repeatedly urged Christianity as a necessary guarantee and reinforcement for ethical behaviour (nos. 543, 565, 273, 339). To be sure, his retreats into the realm of religious belief are rarely psychologically or intellectually satisfying. One is never struck by Mr Spectator's confidence in holy writ, but rather by the anxiety which prompts him to make the leap of faith. Issues 237, 441, and 590 of the Spectator, wherein he “relieves” his readers by referring them to the truths of revelation, are among the most gloomy of all the papers; Mr Spectator's studied cheerfulness seems to have vanished completely. Addison himself was well aware of this and regarded his own “dark and melancholy views” about the nature of God as symptomatic of a specifically British temperament. Time and time again, he referred to the British climate and the psychological constitution of Britons as conducive to feelings of despair, particularly as to the worth of human nature and the possibility of virtuous action.¹⁵

The penetrating reader, who has taken the trouble to do more than merely skim through the Spectator and who has not been waylaid by the embourgoisement approach to modern history, must be struck by the tensions, uncertainty and fatigue that characterize so many of its pages. Neither Addison's elegant style nor his studied cheerfulness can completely obscure the testament of a sensitive conscience trapped between the rational and public world of classical discourse and the fragmented and impassioned consciousness of a complex civilization based upon self-interest and specialization. The fact that Mr Spectator refused to take the easy route, to reject the values of a society which denied its members complete reason and condemned them to an inter-subjective reality, is not sufficient to transform him into a recognizably modern man. Adam Smith, who felt more at home in a society centred upon the divided self and its relationships, revealingly described Mr Spectator as tedious and languid.¹⁶ Moreover, he was not above mocking the “desponding” and “plaintive” tone of such “Whining Christians.”

The Spectatorial approach was a critical, practical and anxious one. Mr Spectator's attitude towards the values of his own society was that of a critic. He believed that his countrymen were perverting the language of moral discourse by confusing ethics with artificial mores and happiness with social success. As a result, they were miserable and directionless. In order to counteract this “hypocrisie” and “confusion,” Mr Spectator attempted to present virtue and contentment in a clearer, basically classical, light in the pages of his papers. But Mr Spectator refused to adopt the stance of an abstract moralist or devotee of virtue; the message he preached was a practical one aimed at prudent men engaged in active life. Man, he argued, was by nature a passionate and sociable animal, not a stoic sage. His morality consisted in doing good works more than in being virtuous. Therefore, Mr Spectator claimed, one should not expect men to detach themselves from their own passions. The most that could be expected was a life of realistic moderation. By drafting this analysis of the passions on to moral discourse proper, Mr Spectator hoped to provide his countrymen with an ethical framework that could relate more closely to their own experience. The tension between the language of virtue and the language of everyday experience had become extreme: as one well-known author puts it, “social morality was becoming divorced from personal morality, and from the ego's confidence in its own integrity and reality.”¹⁷ In order to bridge the chasm between the classical definition of virtue and the modern appreciation of the passions, however, Mr Spectator was thrown back upon the concept of a benign Christian God who ordered men's passions towards a universal end and who rewarded virtuous behaviour in paradise. If such a benign God happened not to exist then man was doomed to a life of “confusion” and “affliction” terminated abruptly by “annihilation.”

Mr Spectator was not the complacent or optimistic man that writers like Gay, Lewis and the Blooms have described him as being. He was a Christian Stoic, caught up in the moral tensions of a transitional period wherein roles and norms were not clearly defined or understood. For such times, he offered less a coherent and consistent code of ethical behaviour than a spectatorial frame of mind which constantly balanced extremes, urged practicality, and restored uneasy minds. “With Pity,” Mr Spectator watched as the “grovelling Multitude” laboured “a little way up the Steep ascent of Truth” only to slide and tumble “down headlong into the Grave” (no. 683). Equally troubled readers sought out Mr Spectator's advice, not only because they appreciated his non-judgemental approach, but also because they knew that he understood.

Notes

1. Peter Gay, “The Spectator as Actor,” Encounter, 29 (December 1967). While written in response to C S Lewis, “Addison,” Essays on the Eighteenth Century presented to David Nichol Smith (Oxford 1945), Gay's essay reinforces many of Lewis's assumptions as to the bourgeois character of the essays in the Spectator.

2. Calhoun Winton, “Addison and Steele in the English Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 27 (1963), 1901-18. Winton attempts to present a picture of Addison as an enlightened philosophe, while ignoring the Stoic and Christian values which dominate his writings.

3. Spectator, Vol. 1, ed. Donald F Bond (Oxford, 1965), xcvi. All citations are taken from the Bond edition and are identified by essay number.

4. N T Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civic Moralist,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1984), 179f.

5. Horst Drescher, Themen und Formen des Periodischen Essays im Spaten 18 Jarhundert (Frankfurt, 1971).

6. Gay, 32.

7. See, for example, Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A Pottle (London, 1952), 75, 83, 233 and 239.

8. Blair's discussion of the Spectator was also reprinted in journals like the Scots Magazine, October 1783.

9. Northanger Abbey, chapter 5.

10. Gay, 31-2.

11. Spectator, Vol. 1, ed. Donald F Bond, xxix-xliii. Sir Roger is the most fully developed of the dramatis personae in the Spectator. While the character of Sir Andrew Freeport, the merchant, is used as a vehicle for getting across some of Mr Spectator's merchantilist views, the character is hardly a symbol of a specifically bourgeois ideology. It is interesting to note that Sir Andrew gives up his commercial interests, buys land, and concentrates on saving his soul in later life. One implication of this development is that the life of a merchant is not particularly conducive to salvation.

12. On Joseph Addision as political actor, see Peter Smithers, The Life of Addison (Oxford, 1968) esp. 91-195. For his political opponents, see Isaac F Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, (Cambridge, 1968).

13. Edward A Bloom and Lillian D Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal (Providence, 1971). While this work avoids some of the more naive assumptions of earlier writers on the Spectator, it still persists in depicting Addison as the champion of the rising middle class.

14. Mr Spectator's use of the concept of reason paralleled that of the Stoics: On Stoicism and its influence on eighteenth-century thought see: A A Long, “Language and Thought in Stoicism,” Problems in Stoicism, ed. A A Long (London, 1972), 75-113; J M Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge, 1969); S Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (London, 1959); Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982), Robert Voitle, “Stoicism and Samuel Johnson,” Studies in Philology (January, 1967), 107-127; Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton, 1985), 175f; and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D D Raphael and A L Macfie (Oxford, 1976), 5f (introduction).

15. See C A Moore, “The English Malady,” Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700-1760, (Minneapolis, 1953), 179f.

16. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 198 and 283 (note 17).

17. J G A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 465.