SOURCE: Wolf, Richard B. “Shaftesbury's Wit in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.” Modern Philology 86, no. 1 (August 1988): 46-53.

[In the essay below, Wolf discusses Shaftesbury's ironic wit, focusing particularly on his use of paradox and the conceit, which he says are used to attack dogmatists.]

Comparing his reaction to Characteristics with his earlier response to the French translation of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, Leibnitz observed that the third earl of Shaftesbury “s'etoit merveilleusement corrigé dans le progrès de ses meditations, et que d'un Lucien il etoit devenu un Platon.”¹ Leibnitz's observation has also turned out to be descriptive of the development of Shaftesbury's critical reputation. The philosopher has come almost wholly to eclipse the satirist.

Apart from lamenting his affected prose, most students of Shaftesbury have ignored his art to concentrate on his thought. Although a few critics have examined his handling of the dialogue form in The Moralists, only Erwin Wolff and John G. Hayman have commented at any length on his literary performance in the “mix'd Satyrical Way of Rallery and Irony” employed in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, Sensus Communis, Soliloquy, and Miscellaneous Reflections.² My intention is to add to Wolff's and Hayman's efforts by examining two prominent features of Shaftesbury's ironic mode: the paradox and the conceit. In doing so, I will focus on A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to show how Shaftesbury adapts these devices to a specific writing occasion.³

Shaftesbury places his wit at the service of truth in the Letter, but the work does not so much offer truths as argue for the outer and inner freedom needed for their pursuit. Ostensibly addressing the controversy provoked by the Camisards, or French Prophets, Shaftesbury playfully weds reflections on religious enthusiasm to a plea for “good humoured” introspection and toleration. Unlike Henry More in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (from which he appears to borrow) or most of the writers responding to the episode of the French Prophets, Shaftesbury does not attempt to provide a definitive account of religious enthusiasm or specific criteria for distinguishing enthusiasm or imposture from true inspiration. The effect of his playing with the concept of enthusiasm seems, indeed, antithetical to these purposes. The Letter expands the label “enthusiast” to include religious fanatics, poets, lovers, atheists, and, ultimately, those great men who are animated by “whatever [is] sublime in human Passions.”⁴ It links the French Prophets to both bacchants and Christian martyrs. It associates melancholy (the cause of enthusiasm in humors pathology) with the formalism and dogmatism often found in “unenthusiastic” orthodoxy. Shaftesbury does not argue for a total skepticism in the Letter. However, his treatment of enthusiasts and enthusiasm supports his call for a tolerant, but critical, examination of these phenomena by suggesting that “Enthusiasm is wonderfully powerful and extensive; that it is a matter of nice Judgment, and the hardest thing in the world to know fully and distinctly” (pp. 80-81).

Shaftesbury's wit in the Letter is well suited to the task of freeing the reader's mind from prejudices and of inducing the questioning approach that the work advocates. Its essential principle is paradox, the artful posing of real or apparent contradictions. Its effect is the usual one of delight produced by a surprising but just linking of ideas, but the surprise takes the extreme form of shock produced by a connection that appears wholly illogical but undeniable. Shaftesbury develops a number of central general paradoxes in the Letter: repression stimulates the growth of enthusiasm; ridicule serves as an aid to reverence; uncritical praise dishonors its object. But the most arresting form of paradox in the work is the verbally pointed, aphoristic, sometimes oxymoronic form that he frequently uses to intensify his arguments.

One of Shaftesbury's wittiest paradoxes appears in his account of men's “Faculty of deceiving themselves,” by means of which “a very small Foundation of any Passion will serve us, not only to act it well, but even to work our selves into it beyond our own reach” (pp. 8-9). An ingenious oxymoron points the first illustration of this phenomenon: “Thus by a little Affectation in Love-Matters, and with the help of Romance or Novel, a Boy of Fifteen, or a grave Man of Fifty, may be sure to grow a very natural Coxcomb, and feel the Belle Passion in good earnest” (p. 9). Exposing the lover's folly, the phrase “natural Coxcomb” puns on the association of both words with idiocy. But by Shaftesbury's time “Coxcomb” had become applicable to fops as well as to pure and simple fools, creating the paradoxical linking here of nature and affectation.

Shaftesbury's “natural Coxcomb” points to a true paradox or mystery—one designed to shock the reader into reassessing conventional assumptions or prejudices. The lover's metamorphosis is a psychological mystery. Despite his inappropriate age and the artificial stimulus to his passion, the lover cannot be accused of dissembling. Nor can he simply be dismissed as deluded, however ridiculous he may appear. He has become the thing he pretended to be; he “feel[s] the Belle Passion in good earnest.” But Shaftesbury's paradoxes are usually more apparent than real, a satiric device employed in what Hayman calls “Shaftesbury's most important strategy: namely, his quiet ridicule of some attitude or belief by turning back upon it its unfortunate or self-contradictory implications.”⁵

To do justice to Shaftesbury's handling of the paradox as a satiric device, I wish to examine two examples in some detail. The first is quoted in part by Hayman to illustrate the author's mode of “quiet ridicule.” It is the passage in which Shaftesbury contrasts heathen tolerance with Christian intolerance:

Not only the Visionarys and Enthusiasts of all kinds were tolerated, your Lordship knows, by the Antients: but on the other side, Philosophy had as free a course, and was permitted as a Ballance against Superstition. And whilst some Sects, such as the Pythagorean and latter Platonick, join'd in with the Superstition and Enthusiasm of the Times; the Epicurean, the Academick, and others, were allow'd to use all the Force of Wit and Raillery against it. And thus matters were ballanc'd; Reason had fair Play; Learning and Science flourish'd. Wonderful was the Harmony and Temper that arose from all these Contrarietys. Thus Superstition and Enthusiasm were mildly treated; and being let alone, they never rag'd to that degree as to occasion Bloodshed, Wars, Persecutions and Devastations in the World. But a new sort of Policy, which extends it self to another World, and considers the future Lives and Happiness of Men rather than the present, has made us leap the Bounds of natural Humanity; and out of a supernatural Charity, has taught us the way of plaguing one another most devoutly. It has rais'd an Antipathy which no temporal Interest cou'd ever do; and entail'd upon us a mutual Hatred to all Eternity.

[Pp. 28-29]

The Christian/heathen contrast is a commonplace in the toleration literature of the period. Shaftesbury introduces an element of novelty by adapting it to his argument for freedom of raillery, and it is also well suited to his practice elsewhere in the Letter of using classical antiquity for a perspective on contemporary issues.⁶ But the primary claim to literary merit here rests on Shaftesbury's witty development of the paradox of Christian persecution, a fact that becomes clear when the passage is compared with a similar one in Matthew Tindal's Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, and the Rights of Mankind, in Matters of Religion (1697):

The Heathens, who had more and wider Differences about Matters of Religion than the Christians, yet because they tolerated one another, had not those irreconcilable Animosities, fierce Contentions and unnatural Wars, which have frequently happened since the Propagation of the Christian Religion; which yet without Impiety cannot be imputed to its Genius, which is pure, peaceable, and inoffensive, and requires a universal Love and Charity for all Men of what Profession soever. No, it's the Antichristian Doctrine of Persecution that has transformed the mild and sociable Nature of Man into greater Ferocity than that of Wolves and Tigers. … So by degrees Men arrive to the height of Fury, Rage, and Madness, and break thro not only all the Ties of Christianity, but even Humanity; tho whilst they thus furnish such powerful Provocations to endless Discords, Hatreds, Factions, Wars, Massacres, &c. they have nothing in their Mouths but the Good of the Church and Salvation of Souls, not considering that without Love they cannot be Christ's Disciples, (John 13.) and that all other Duties without Charity profit nothing.⁷

Tindal's treatment of Christian intolerance also emphasizes the ironic discrepancy between tenets and practice but not in the form of paradox. By making an overt distinction between the true “Genius” of Christianity and “the Antichristian Doctrine of Persecution,” Tindal precludes the apparent linking of irreconcilable ideas that is the basis for Shaftesbury's technique. In Tindal the charge of hypocrisy is explicit; in Shaftesbury it is implicit, conveyed with satiric indirection. Against the concordia discors of the ancients, Shaftesbury poses the modern Christian paradox of salvation through destruction. Pointed by a series of antitheses (“future Lives and Happiness” vs. “present”; “natural Humanity” vs. “supernatural Charity”; “temporal Interest” vs. “Hatred to all Eternity”), his paradox is epitomized in the phrase “plaguing one another most devoutly,” an oxymoron sharpened by the pun on “devout.” In Shaftesbury's satiric context this phrase produces a further shock as an ironic echo of the most repeated injunction to charity in the New Testament: Christ's admonition to his disciples “That ye love one another.” Lacking such a context, Tindal's phrase “they tolerated one another” fails to evoke this association. His overt reference to the Gospel of John at the end of the passage effectively caps his argument, but it does not deliver the full ironic jolt of Shaftesbury's allusion.

Shaftesbury's introduction of the French Prophets provides another instructive illustration of his use of paradox:

There are some, it seems, of our good Brethren, the French Protestants, lately come amongst us, who are mightily taken with this Primitive way [“of affronting the publick Worship”]. They have set a-foot the Spirit of Martyrdom to a wonder in their own Country; and they long to be trying it here, if we will give 'em leave: that is to say, if we will do 'em the favor to hang or imprison 'em; if we will be so kind as to break their Bones for 'em, after their Country fashion, blow up their Zeal, and stir a-fresh the Coals of Persecution. But no such Grace can they yet obtain of us. So hard-hearted we are, that tho their own Mob are willing to bestow kind Blows upon 'em, and stone 'em now and then in the Street; tho the Priests of their own Nation wou'd gladly give 'em their desir'd Discipline, and are earnest to light their probationary Fires for 'em: We English Men, who are Masters in our own Country, will not suffer the Enthusiasts to be thus us'd.

[Pp. 41-42]

Behind the Prophets' apparently paradoxical desire to be abused, Shaftesbury implies, is not disinterested love of religious truth but a calculated design. The Prophets seek persecution in order to stimulate their enthusiasm, acquire glory, and enlarge their following. Shaftesbury playfully emphasizes the point with a pun on “blow up” (set up by the preceding phrase “break their Bones”): the Prophets court their opponents' attempts to “explode” their zeal as a means of inflating it. Evoking the etymology of “inspiration,” moreover, “blow up” further debunks the Prophets' pretensions by suggesting that they are artificially “inspired” rather than truly infused with the spirit of God. Shaftesbury also sharpens the paradox epitomized in “kind Blows” with a device akin to biblical allusion, the ironic use of technical religious terms such as “Grace” and “Discipline.”

Shaftesbury is less interested here in exposing the hypocrisy of the French Prophets, however, than in exposing the folly of those favoring their suppression. By revealing the Prophets' ulterior motives, he presents their would-be persecutors as gulls, whose intolerance only furthers the Prophets' cause. Despite their inhuman—not to mention unchristian—delight in persecution, they are ultimately fools manipulated by knaves. In contrast to their folly, Shaftesbury proposes the wise virtue of tolerance, paradoxically and patriotically embodied in the “hard-hearted” lenience of “we English Men.” Shaftesbury's later, more sympathetic portrait of the Prophets as pitiful, if contemptible, victims of delusion (pp. 68-73) appears to result from a shift in satiric objectives rather than from an inconsistent explanation of their zeal. In the later instance, the Prophets themselves—not their intolerant opponents—are the primary object of attack.

A second prominent device of Shaftesbury's ironic art is the ingenious (and often extended) analogy or conceit. Although it unites merely disparate rather than antithetical elements, the conceit too can produce a powerful shock of delight, especially if the elements come from radically different associative contexts. The satiric potential of this device is succinctly illustrated by the treatment accorded proponents of Pascal's wager (as advanced by Archbishop Tillotson). Shaftesbury compares them to “crafty Beggars” who prudently award a title to every stranger they approach: “For if there shou'd be really a Lord, in the case; we shou'd be undone (say they) for want of giving the Title: But if the Party shou'd be no Lord, there wou'd be no harm; it wou'd not be ill taken” (p. 55). The meanness of the second term of Shaftesbury's comparison forcefully deflates the first, suggesting that the position of Pascal and Tillotson results from spiritual cowardice and venality.

As with paradox, a proper appreciation of Shaftesbury's use of the conceit requires more extensive examples. The first I have chosen develops the standard toleration argument that persecution inflames rather than extinguishes the zeal of its victims:

I can hardly forbear fancying, that if we had but an Inquisition, or some formal Court of Judicature, with grave Officers, and Judges, erected to restrain Poetical Licence, and in general to suppress that Fancy and Humour of Versification; but in particular that most extravagant Passion of Love, as it is set out by Poets, in its Heathenish Dress of Venus's and Cupid's; if the Poets, as Ringleaders and Teachers of this Heresy, were under grievous Penaltys forbid to enchant the People by their vein of Rhyming; and if the People, on the other side, were under proportionable Penaltys forbid to hearken to any such Charm, or lend their Attention to any Love-Tale, so much as a Play, a Novel, or a Ballad; we might perhaps see a new Arcadia arising out of this heavy Persecution: Old People and Young wou'd be seiz'd with a versifying Spirit; we shou'd have Field-Coventicles of Lovers and Poets; Forests wou'd be fill'd with romantick Shepherds and Shepherdesses; and rocks resound with Ecchoes of Hymns and Praises offer'd to the Powers of Love. We might have a fair Chance by this means to bring back the whole Train of Heathen Gods, and set our cold Northern Island burning with as many Altars to Venus and Apollo, as formerly either Cyprus, Delos, or any of those warmer Grecian Climates.

[Pp. 32-33]

Shaftesbury's coupling of religious with poetic persecution is unexpected but apt, drawing on both the traditional Christian linking of religious with amatory experience and the “theological” trappings of love poetry in the classical mode. Shaftesbury's development of the conceit, moreover, illustrates one of the device's distinctive effects—the pleasure produced by the author's ingenuity in working out an elaborate series of similarities. To this delight is added one deriving from context. The conceit pulls together earlier strands of the Letter, linking its opening remarks on belief in the Muses with its passing references to enthusiasm in love (pp. 9, 21, 27-28, 31). Shaftesbury's references to males of fifteen and fifty who turn “natural Coxcomb” with the aid of a romance and to “Modifications of Spleen” such as “Love, or Gallantry, or Knight-Errantry” fittingly culminate in the ludicrous vision of English lovers of all ages wandering the countryside as crack-brained shepherds and shepherdesses hymning the pagan gods.

Shaftesbury's satiric assault on romantic love and the pastoral, however, is only incidental. His primary targets in the passage are the proponents of persecution and, to a lesser extent, opportunistic enthusiasts such as the French Prophets. Absurdly overreacting to a patently harmless deviation from orthodoxy, Shaftesbury's grave suppressors provoke a major outbreak of heresy. Their actions are linked explicitly to the Roman Catholic excesses of the Inquisition and perhaps implicitly to the excesses of English Puritanism, which sanctioned its own form of literary repression during the Interregnum. Shaftesbury's enthusiasts, on the other hand—their zeal and ranks swollen by persecution—become the ridiculous inhabitants of a pastoral cloud-cuckoo-land, with their religious fervor linked ironically to the pagan and profane. Shaftesbury's diction accentuates the ironies generated by the conceit. The preposterous seriousness with which his persecutors undertake their attempt “to restrain Poetical License” is underscored by the formality of quasi-legal phrases such as “formal Court of Judicature” and “proportionable Penaltys.” The vocabulary of religious enthusiasm, on the other hand, is applied with devastating effect to the new Arcadians in phrases such as “seiz'd with a versifying Spirit” and “Field Conventicles of Lovers and Poets”—the latter linking Shaftesbury's pagan revival to the clandestine open-air meetings of the French Prophets in the Cévennes.

A second conceit worth examining in detail follows the “kind Blows” passage discussed earlier. Its comparison of the Prophets to puppets provides a memorable transition from the argument that persecution enflames enthusiasm to the argument that toleration and raillery most effectively extinguish it:

But how barbarous and more than heathenishly cruel are we tolerating English Men! For not contented to deny these Prophesying Enthusiasts the Honor of a Persecution, we have deliver'd 'em over to the cruellest Contempt in the World. I am told they are at this time the Subject of a choice Droll or Puppet-Shew at Bart'lemy-Fair. There doubtless their strange Voices and involuntary Agitations are admirably well acted, by the Motion of Wires, and Inspiration of Pipes. For the Bodys of the Prophets, in their state of Prophecy, being not in their own power, but (as they say themselves) mere passive Organs, actuated by an exterior Force, have nothing natural or resembling real Life in any of their Sounds or Motions: so that how aukardly soever a Puppet-Shew may imitate other Actions, it must needs represent this Passion to the life. And whilst Bart'lemy-Fair is in possession of this Privilege, I dare stand Security to our National Church, that no Sect of Enthusiasts, no new Venders of Prophecy or Miracles, shall ever get the start, or put her to the trouble of trying her Strength with 'em, in any Case.

[Pp. 42-44]

The puppet show conceit may shed little light on the nature of the Prophets' enthusiasm, but it forcefully illustrates Shaftesbury's point about the effectiveness of raillery (as opposed to persecution) as a means of countering the sect's appeal. Detailing the correspondence between the grotesque, unnatural sounds and motions of the Prophets in their ecstasies and the imperfect, mechanical mimicry of marionettes, Shaftesbury ridicules the bizarre behavior that scandalized the sect's opponents. With the first of several ironic allusions in the Letter to John Lacy's defense of the Prophets in Lacy's preface to the second edition of A Cry from the Desart (1707), Shaftesbury denigrates the group's pretensions to divine inspiration by comparing the Prophets' account of possession by the Holy Spirit to puppets' manipulation by a puppeteer.

The Bartholomew Fair setting itself contributes to Shaftesbury's attack. In the first place, it links the Prophets to an institution with a distinctly unsavory reputation (a fact illustrated by the attempt mounted in 1708 to reduce the fair from two weeks to three days). Shaftesbury enhances this damaging association when he dismisses the sect as “new Venders of Prophecy or Miracles,” identifying them with the fair's mountebanks and sellers of gimcracks. In the second place, the setting links the Prophets with Rabbi Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (performed around fair time in 1702, 1704, and 1707). Busy, whose greed and gluttony provide an ironic contrast to his censorious Puritanism, attempts to shut down a puppet show in the final act of the play, only to be bested in argument by one of the puppets, who asserts against him: “Nay I'le proue, against eer a Rabbin of 'hem all, that my standing is as lawfull as his; that I speak by inspiration, as well as he; that I haue as little to doe with learning as he; and doe scorne her helps as much as he.”⁸

While the “new Arcadia” conceit ties together earlier strands of the Letter, the puppet show conceit—extended to the stage in general—unites the pages immediately following it. The triumph of Protestantism in England, Shaftesbury suggests, was greatly helped by the Papists' treating their opponents (burned as heretics at Smithfield, the site of Bartholomew Fair) “in a more tragical way” than that of a puppet show (p. 44). The Romans would have posed a greater threat to Christianity “if they had chose to bring our primitive Founders upon the Stage in a pleasanter way than that of Bear-Skins and Pitch-Barrels” (pp. 44-45). The Jews might have countered the teachings of Jesus more successfully if they had “but taken the Fancy to act such Puppet-Shews in his Contempt, as at this hour the Papists are acting in his Honor” (p. 46). Arguing that raillery is a foe to falsehood but a friend to truth, Shaftesbury asserts that Socrates' good-humored response to Aristophanes' puppet show tactics in The Clouds enhanced the philosopher's reputation and confirmed the truth of his teachings (pp. 47-49). Finally, in preparing to move on to discuss misconceptions of God, he observes that “the melancholy way of treating Religion is that which, according to my Apprehension, renders it so tragical, and is the occasion of its acting in reality such dismal Tragedys' in the world” (p. 49). By the time that Shaftesbury rings his last change on it, the puppet show conceit has encompassed a whole history of religious enthusiasm and persecution.

Hayman's description of Shaftesbury's ironic procedure as “quiet ridicule” seems accurate if the style of raillery in the Letter is compared with the strident invective found in most attacks on religious enthusiasts or their opponents in the period. The distinction is one that Shaftesbury himself hinted at in a marginal query in the hand-corrected set of 1711 Characteristics now housed in the British Library. Nettled by attacks on his advocacy of ridicule in questions of religion, he asked “whether Raillery w^ch signifys back biting & that w^ch means Banter be writ y^e same way.”⁹ If Shaftesbury's ridicule in the Letter is “quiet” in this sense, however, it is certainly not timid or easily ignored. And the grudging praise of early answerers speaks less to this fact than their heated condemnation of a work that does not restrict its ironic wit solely to targets on the fringes of orthodoxy.

Shaftesbury may have claimed to deplore the standards of taste that obliged him to turn to satire in order to court “the airy Reader” who would find the formal Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit “oppressive.”¹⁰ But his compunction about his ironic works in no way undermines their achievement. Shaftesbury's witty use of devices such as the paradox and the conceit to question the assumptions and deflate the pretensions of dogmatists of all persuasions reveals a distinctive literary talent.

Notes

1. “Leibniz an Remond,” no. 11, February 11, 1715 N.S., Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (1875-90; reprint, Hildesheim, 1960), 3:637.

2. Erwin Wolff, Shaftesbury und seine Bedeutung für die englische Literature des 18.Jhs.: Der Moralist und die literarische Form, Buchreihe der Anglia, Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, vol. 8 (Tübingen, 1960); John G. Hayman, “Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 10 (1970): 491-504. Wolff describes Shaftesbury's experimentation with the various genres represented in Characteristics, while Hayman discusses the evolution of the author's persona in his ironic works. Shaftesbury employed the phrase “mix'd Satyrical Way of Raillery and Irony” in a letter commenting on Leibnitz's remarks on Characteristics (Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, July 25, 1712 N.S., Public Record Office, Shaftesbury Papers, PRO 30/24/23/9, p. 249).

3. One reason for the relative neglect of Shaftesbury's ironic works may be that we rarely read them in the form that suits them best. When contemporaries prefaced their attacks on A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (hereafter referred to as Letter) by acknowledging its sparkling style and wit, they were responding to a version of the piece that few people have read since the publication of Characteristics in 1711. Shaftesbury made numerous minor changes in the Letter, Sensus Communis, and Soliloquy in preparing these previously published works for the first and second editions of Characteristics. His stylistic revisions aimed at courting the style-conscious British gentleman, “the age running so much into the politeness of this sort” (Shaftesbury to Thomas Micklethwayte, January 19, 1711 N.S., PRO 30/24/23/8, p. 114). But editors and textual critics since John M. Robertson have noted the unfortunate effect of much of Shaftesbury's tinkering with style. His crusade against ten or more consecutive monosyllabic words, for instance, produced some sixty-five changes in the fifty-three pages of Letter text in the first edition of Characteristics: “fit” became “capacitated”; “first” became “antecedently”; a “dark” hour became a “heavy and dark” one. Such changes helped bloat a prose already inclined to fullness. Various other changes associated with the incorporation of the Letter into Characteristics have also tended to obscure Shaftesbury's satiric art. The “treatise” label, the numbering of sections, and the footnotes (eleven in 1711; thirty-two in 1714) added the foreign trappings of more formal and methodical writing without exploiting the ironic potential that results. Unlike Swift's Tale of a Tub, the Letter makes no grandiose claims for system and comprehensiveness; unlike the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, it makes no attempt to play with the contradiction between methodic and epistolary form. Shaftesbury's footnotes do not parody the machinery of pedantry in the manner of the Scriblerians, and his cross-references—fully half of the notes to the Letter—repeatedly interrupt the play of wit to direct the reader outside the passage at hand. If we are to appreciate the literary properties of works such as the Letter, we might do better to read them in their original printed form.

4. Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1708), p. 82; hereafter cited in the text.

5. Hayman, p. 495.

6. For Shaftesbury's use of classical literature and history in attacking Christianity, see A. O. Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and the Classics,” in Gesellschaft. Kulture. Literatur: Rezeption un Originalität im Wachsen einer europäischen Literatur un Geistigkeit: Beiträge Luitpold Wallach gewidmet, ed. Karl Bosl, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 11 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 248-53.

7. Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, and the Rights of Mankind, in Matters of Religion (London, 1697), pp. 34-36.

8. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-52), 6:136.

9. Characteristicks (London, 1711), 1:65 (British Library, C.28g.16).

10. Characteristicks, 2d ed. (London, 1714), 3:8. In commenting on Leibnitz's remarks about Characteristics, Shaftesbury asserted even more forcefully that ironic works such as the Letter were for him a distasteful concession to the corrupt taste of the audience that he courted (see n. 2 above).