Chapter VII (1)

FRANCIS ATTERBURY--LORD SHAFTESBURY--BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE--LORD
BOLINGBROKE--BISHOP BERKELEY--WILLIAM LAW--BISHOP
BUTLER--BISHOP WARBURTON.

[Sidenote: Francis Atterbury (1662-1732).]

During the first half of the eighteenth century the position held by Bishop Atterbury was one of high eminence. Addison ranked him with the most illustrious geniuses of his age; Pope said he was one of the greatest men in polite learning the nation ever possessed; Doddridge called him the glory of English orators; and Johnson said that for style his sermons are among the best.

Unfortunately Atterbury's literary gifts, like his oratory, lack the merit of permanence, and his sermons, more conspicuous for eloquence than for weightiness of matter, although extremely popular at the time, have long ceased to be read. His prominence among the Queen Anne wits,--and he was admired by them all,--is a sufficient reason for saying a few words about him in these pages.

He was born in 1662, and, like Prior, educated at Westminster under the famous Dr. Busby. Thence he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a good reputation. He undertook the tutorship of the Hon. C. Boyle, a young man of more spirit than judgment, who had the audacity to enter the lists with Bentley in a matter of scholarship. For this rash deed Atterbury must be held responsible. Sir William Temple had published a foolish but eloquently written essay in defence of the ancient writers in comparison with the modern. In this essay he praises warmly the _Letters of Phalaris_. Of these letters Boyle, with the help of Atterbury and other members of Christ Church, published a new edition to satisfy the demand caused by Temple's essay. Bentley, roused to reply by a remark of Boyle in his preface, proved that the _Letters_ were not only spurious but contemptible. Under his pupil's name Atterbury replied to Bentley's _Dissertations_, and to the discussion, as the reader will remember, Swift added wit if not argument.

For the moment Boyle's, or rather Atterbury's success, was great, for wit and rhetoric are powerful persuasives. The authors, too, had the Christ Church men to back them, the arch-critic having treated them with contempt. Atterbury's share in the work, as he tells Boyle, "consisted in writing more than half the book, in reviewing a great part of the rest, and in transcribing the whole." His _Examination of Dr. Bentley's Dissertations_ (1698) is a brilliant piece of work, and 'deserves the praise,' says Macaulay, '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.' Having taken holy orders, Atterbury became a court preacher, and ample clerical honours fell to his share. In 1700 he published a book entitled, _The Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_, which was warmly applauded by High Churchmen. In 1701 he was appointed Archdeacon of Totness, and afterwards Prebend of Exeter. He became the favourite chaplain of Queen Anne, and when Prince George died proved the power of his eloquence by representing 'his unassuming virtues in such high relief that his widow could not help feeling her irreparable loss.'

Atterbury was made successively Dean of Carlisle and of Christ Church, and in 1713 succeeded Sprat as Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester. Before making Swift's acquaintance he recommended his friend Trelawney, Bishop of Exeter, to read the _Tale of a Tub_, a book which is to be valued, 'in spite of its profaneness,' as 'an original in its kind, full of wit, humour, good sense, and learning.' Atterbury's taste for literature was not always so discriminative. He advised Pope, as has been already stated, to 'polish' _Samson Agonistes_, declared that all verses should have instruction at the bottom of them, and told the poet, as though he had discovered a merit, that his poetry was 'all over morality from the beginning to the end of it.' He ventured occasionally into the verse-making field himself, and wrote a song to Silvia, in which, after admitting that he had loved before as men worship strange deities, he adds:

'My heart, 'tis true, has often ranged,
Like bees on gaudy flowers,
And many a thousand loves has changed,
Till it was fixed on yours.

'But, Silvia, when I saw those eyes,
'Twas soon determined there;
Stars might as well forsake the skies,
And vanish into air.

'When I from this great rule do err,
New beauties to adore,
May I again turn wanderer,
And never settle more.'

The close friendship between Atterbury and Pope did honour to both men, and when Pope went to London he would 'lie at the deanery.' There, unknown to his friend, the bishop carried on his Jacobite intrigues, and there may still be seen, in a residence made famous by more than one great name, a secret room in which Atterbury concealed his treasonable correspondence. The poet did not believe that his friend was guilty, but it has been well known since the publication of the Stuart papers, more than forty years ago, that the splendid defence made by Atterbury at his trial in the House of Lords was based upon a falsehood. For years the bishop appears to have corresponded, under feigned names and by the help of ciphers, with 'the king over the water;' but the plot which led to his imprisonment and ultimate exile was not discovered until 1722, when he was arrested for high treason. At his trial he called God to witness his innocence; and when Pope took leave of him in the Tower he told the poet he would allow him to call his sentence a just one if he should ever find that he had dealings with the Pretender in his exile. Pope gave evidence at his trial, and, as he told Spence, lost his self-possession and made two or three blunders.

Atterbury was exiled in June, 1723. On reaching Calais he heard that Bolingbroke had just arrived there on his way to England, having had a royal pardon. 'Then I am exchanged,' he said.

The pathetic story of his banishment, and of his devoted daughter's illness and voyage to the south of France, where after a union of a few hours, she died in her father's arms, is full of the most touching details, and may be read in Atterbury's correspondence. 'She is gone,' the bishop wrote, 'and I must follow her. When I do, may my latter end be like hers! It was my business to have taught her to die; instead of it, she has taught me.' Like Fielding's account of his _Voyage to Lisbon_, the letters give a picture of the time, and of travelling discomforts and difficulties of which we, in these more fortunate days, know nothing. The bishop, who did not long survive his daughter, died in 1732, but before the end came he defended himself admirably from the accusation of Oldmixon, a libeller who stands in the pillory of the _Dunciad_, that he had helped to garble Clarendon's _History_. The body was carried to England and privately buried by the side of his daughter in Westminster Abbey. The eloquence of Atterbury's sermons--there are four volumes of them in print--has not secured to them a lasting place in literature, but they are distinguished by purity of style, and have enough of _unction_ to make them highly effective as pulpit discourses. In book form, too, they were for a long time popular, and reached an eighth edition about thirty years after the bishop's death. The eloquent sermon on the death of Lady Cutts endows the lady with such an array of virtues, that one is inclined to wonder how so many rare qualities could have been exhibited in so brief a life:

'She excelled in all the characters that belonged to her, and
was in a great measure equal to all the obligations that she lay
under. She was devout without superstition; strict, without ill
humour; good-natured, without weakness; cheerful, without
levity; regular, without affectation. She was to her husband the
best of wives, the most agreeable of companions, and most
faithful of friends; to her servants the best of mistresses; to
her relations extremely respectful; to her inferiors very
obliging; and by all that knew her, either nearly or at a
distance, she was reckoned and confessed to be one of the best
of women. And yet all this goodness and all this excellence was
bounded within the compass of eighteen years and as many days;
for no longer was she allowed to live among us. She was snatched
out of the world as soon almost as she had made her appearance
in it, like a jewel of high price just shown a little, and then
put up again, and we were deprived of her by that time we had
learnt to value her. But circles may be complete though small;
the perfection of life doth not consist in the length of it.'

As a friend of literature and of men of letters, Atterbury claims the student's recognition, and the five volumes of his correspondence deserve to be consulted.

[Sidenote: Anthony, third Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).]

'I will tell you,' writes the poet Gray, 'how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm.'

One hundred and thirty-five years have gone by since Gray wrote his estimate of Lord Shaftesbury, whose _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times_ (1711) passed through several editions in the last century. The first volume consists of: _A Letter concerning Enthusiasm_, _An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour_ and _Advice to an Author_; Vol. ii. contains _An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit_ (1699), and _The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody_ (1709), and Vol. iii. contains _Miscellaneous Reflections_ and the _Judgments of Hercules_.

Shaftesbury was a Deist, and while professing to honour the Christian faith, which he terms 'our holy religion,' exercises his wit and casuistry and command of English to undermine it. Pope, who shows in the _Essay on Man_ that he had read the _Characteristics_, said that to his knowledge 'the work had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity,' a judgment which may seem extravagant, for Shaftesbury is too vague and rhetorical greatly to influence thoughtful readers, and too much of a 'virtuoso,' to use his own words, for readers of another class; yet the fact that the work passed, as we have said, through several editions, shows that the author had a considerable public to whom he could appeal. Moreover, it is clear that what Mr. Balfour calls 'the shallow optimism' of his creed was not deemed so inconsiderable then as it now appears, or Berkeley would not have deemed it necessary to controvert his arguments in the third Dialogue of his _Alciphron_. Like Berkeley, Shaftesbury occasionally makes use of the dialogue very effectively, but he has not the bishop's incisiveness. His style, though often faulty, and giving one the impression that the author is affected, and wishes to say fine things, is at its best fresh and lucid. The reader will observe that whatever be the topic Shaftesbury professes to discuss, his one aim is to assert his principles as a free-thinking and free-speaking philosopher. His inferences, his illustrations, his criticisms, and exaltation of the 'moral sense,' are all so many underhanded blows at the faith which he never openly opposes.

Thus his essay on the _Freedom of Wit and Humour_ is chiefly written in defence of raillery in the discussion of serious subjects, when managed 'with good breeding,' and for 'a liberty in decent language to question everything' amongst gentlemen and friends. He regards ridicule as the antidote to enthusiasm, believes in the harmony and perfection of nature, and considers that evil only exists in our ignorance. Mr. Leslie Stephen, whose impartiality in estimating an author like Shaftesbury will not be questioned, calls him a wearisome and perplexed writer, whose rhetoric is flimsy, but who has 'a true vigour and originality which redeems him from contempt.'

Judged by his influence on the age Shaftesbury's place in the history of literature and of philosophy is an important one. Seed springs up quickly when the soil is prepared for it, and Shaftesbury by his belief in the perfectibility of human nature through the aid of culture, appealed, as Mandeville also did from a lower and opposite platform, to the views current in polite society. According to Shaftesbury men have a natural instinct for virtue, and the sense of what is beautiful enables the virtuoso to reject what is evil and to cleave to what is good. Let a man once see that to be wicked is to be miserable, and virtue will be dear for its own sake apart from the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. He found salvation for the world in a cultivated taste, but had no gospel for the men whose tastes were not cultivated.

Voltaire sneered at the optimism of the _Essay on Man_ and of the _Characteristics_. 'Shaftesbury,' he says, 'who made the fable fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known; mis-shapen in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment.'

[Sidenote: Bernard de Mandeville (1670?-1733).]

Bernard de Mandeville gained much notoriety by his _Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits_ (1723). The book opens with a poem in doggrel verse called _The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned honest_, the purport of which is to show that as the bees became virtuous, they ceased to be successful. He closes with the moral that

'To enjoy the world's conveniences,
Be famed in war, yet live in ease,
Without great vices is a vain
Utopia, seated in the brain.
Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live,
While we the benefits receive.'

In the prose which follows the fable, Mandeville may at least claim the credit of being outspoken, and he does not scruple to say that modesty is a sham and that what seems like virtue is nothing but self-love. 'I often,' he says, 'compare the virtues of good men to your large china jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs.'

While declaring that he is far from encouraging vice, he regards it as essential to the well-being of society. The degradation of the race excites his amusement, and the fact that he cannot see a way of escape from it, causes no regret. Shaftesbury's arguments excited the mirth of a man who believed neither in present nor future good 'Two systems,' he says, 'cannot be more opposite than his lordship's and mine. His notions, I confess, are generous and refined. They are a high compliment to human kind, and capable, by the help of a little enthusiasm, of inspiring us with the most noble sentiments concerning the dignity of our exalted nature. What pity it is that they are not true.'

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.[57] The book was attacked by Warburton and Law, and with much force and humour by Berkeley, in the second Dialogue of _Alciphron_. But the bishop, to use a homely phrase, does not hit the right nail on the head. Instead of arguing that virtue and goodness are realities, while evil, being unreal and antagonistic to man's nature, is an enemy to be fought against and conquered, Berkeley takes a lower ground, and is content to show in his reply to Mandeville that virtue is more profitable to a state than vice. He annihilates many of Mandeville's arguments in a masterly style, but it was left to the author of the _Serious Call_ to strike at the root of Mandeville's fallacy, and to show how the seat of virtue, if I may apply Hooker's noble words with regard to law, 'is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.'

[Sidenote: Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751).]

The life of Henry St. John was a mass of contradictions. He was a brilliant politician who affected to be a wise statesman, a traitor to his country while pretending to be a patriot, an orator whose lips distilled honied phrases which his actions belied, a man of insatiable ambition who masked as a philosopher, a profligate without shame, a faithless friend, and an unscrupulous opponent. Blessed with every charm of manner, features, and voice, with a taste for literature and a large faculty of acquisition, he was a slave to the meanest vices. A Secretary of State at thirty-two, no man probably ever entered upon public life with brighter prospects, and the secret of all his failures was due to the want of character. 'Few people,' says Lord Hervey, 'ever believed him without being deceived or trusted him without being betrayed; he was one to whom prosperity was no advantage, and adversity no instruction.'

It is said that his genius as an orator was of a high order and this we can believe the more readily since the style of his works is distinctly oratorical. In speech so much depends upon voice and manner that it is possible for a shallow thinker to be an extremely attractive speaker; Bolingbroke's speeches have not been preserved, and we may therefore continue, if we please, to hold with Pitt, that they are the most desirable of all the lost fragments of literature; his writings, far more showy than solid, do not convey a lofty impression of intellectual power. Obvious truths and well-worn truisms are uttered in high-sounding words, but in no department of thought can it be said that Bolingbroke breaks new ground. Much that he wrote was for the day and died with it, and if his more ambitious efforts, written with an eye to posterity, cannot justly be described as unreadable, they contain comparatively little which makes them worthy to be read.

His defence of his conduct in _A Letter to Sir William Windham_, written in 1717, but not published until after the author's death, though worthless as a defence, is a fine piece of special pleading in Bolingbroke's best style. It could deceive no one acquainted with the part played by the author before the death of Queen Anne, and afterwards in exile, but it afforded him an opportunity for attacking his former colleague, Oxford, with all the weapons available by an unscrupulous and powerful assailant. He declares in this letter that he preferred exile rather than to make common cause with the man whom he abhorred. Writing of Oxford as a colleague in the government of the country he observes in a skilfully turned passage:

'The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government; and
the pilot and the minister are in similar circumstances. It
seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course,
and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently
seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances the conduct
of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the
appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once
consummated, the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so
natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he
could have done the same. But on the other hand the man who
proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place
of ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing
accidents, is eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both,
who begins every day something new, and carries nothing on to
perfection, may impose awhile on the world: but a little sooner
or a little later the mystery will be revealed, and nothing will
be found to be couched under it but a thread of pitiful
expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther
than living from day to day. Which of these pictures resembles
Oxford most you will determine.'

It has been said with somewhat daring exaggeration, that Burke never produced anything nobler than this passage, and the writer regards the whole composition of the _Letter to Windham_ as almost faultless.[58]

That it is Bolingbroke's masterpiece may be readily admitted, but in this _Letter_, as elsewhere, the merits of Bolingbroke's style are those of the popular orator who conceals repetitions, contradictory statements, and emptiness of thought under a dazzling display of rhetoric. That he had splendid gifts and exhibited an extraordinary ingenuity of resource was acknowledged by friend and foe. At one time taking a distinguished part in European affairs, at another artfully intriguing, sometimes posing as a moralist and philosopher while a slave to debauchery, and at other times affecting a love of retirement while a slave to ambition--Bolingbroke acted a part which made him one of the most conspicuous figures of the time. He knew how to fascinate men of greater genius than he possessed, and how to guide men intellectually his superiors. The witchcraft of his wit and the charm of his manners no longer disturb the judgment. As a statesman Bolingbroke is now comparatively despised, as a man of letters he is generally regarded as a brilliant pretender, and if his name survives in the history of literature it is chiefly due to the friendship of Pope. Unfortunately the memory of this celebrated friendship is associated with one of the most ignoble acts of Bolingbroke's life. When Pope lay dying, Bolingbroke wept over his friend exclaiming, 'O great God, what is man!' and Spence relates that upon telling his lordship how Pope whenever he was sensible said something kindly of his friends as if his humanity outlasted his understanding, Bolingbroke replied, '"It has so! I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends or a more general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than"--sinking his head and losing himself in tears.' His sorrow was speedily changed to anger. Pope, no doubt in admiration of his friend's genius, had privately printed 1,500 copies of his _Patriot King_, one of Bolingbroke's ablest but most sophistical works. The philosopher had only allowed a few copies to be printed for his friends, and the discovery of Pope's conduct roused his indignation. In 1749 he put a corrected copy of the work into Mallet's hands for publication with an advertisement in which Pope is treated with contempt. He had not the courage to assail the memory of his friend openly, and hired an unprincipled man to do it. The poet had acted trickily, after his wonted habit, though in all likelihood with the design of doing Bolingbroke a service. It was a fault to be forgiven by a friend, but Bolingbroke, after nursing his anger for five years, gave vent to it in this contemptible and underhand way. He died two years afterwards, and in 1754 the posthumous publication of Bolingbroke's _Philosophical Writings_ by Mallet, aroused a storm of indignation in the country, which his debauchery and political immorality had failed to excite. Johnson's saying on the occasion is well-known:

'Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.'

The most noteworthy estimate of Bolingbroke's character made in our day comes from the pen of Mr. John Morley,[59] who describes as follows his position as a man of letters. 'He handled the great and difficult instrument of written language with such freedom and copiousness, such vivacity and ease, that in spite of much literary foppery and falsetto, he ranks in all that musicians call execution, only below the three or four highest masters of English prose. Yet of all the characters in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere.' This is true. By his 'execution,' consummate though it be, he is unable to conceal his insincerity and shallowness. 'Bolingbroke,' said Lord Shelburne, was 'all surface,' and in that sentence his character is written.

'People seem to think,' said Carlyle, 'that a style can be put off or put on, not like a skin, but like a coat. Is not a skin verily a product and close kinsfellow of all that lies under it,--exact type of the nature of the beast, not to be plucked off without flaying and death?'

Two years after the publication of the _Philosophical Writings_, Edmund Burke, then a young man of twenty-four, published _A Vindication of Natural Society_, in a _Letter to Lord----. By a late noble writer_, in which Lord Bolingbroke's style is imitated, and his arguments against revealed religion applied to exhibit 'the miseries and evils arising to mankind from every species of Artificial Society.' So close is the imitation of Bolingbroke's style and mode of argument in this piece of irony, that it was for a time believed to be a genuine production, and Mallet found it necessary to disavow it publicly.

Of Bolingbroke's Works, the _Dissertation on Parties_ appeared in 1735. _Letters on Patriotism_, and _Idea of a Patriot King_, in 1749; _Letters on the Study of History_, in 1752; _Letter to Sir W. Windham_, 1753, and the _Philosophical Writings_, as already stated, in 1754. Chronologically, therefore, he would belong to the Handbook which deals with the latter half of the century, were it not that his most important works were posthumous, and that Bolingbroke's intimate relations with Pope place him among the most conspicuous figures belonging to Pope's age.

[Sidenote: George Berkeley (1685-1753).]

Among the men of high intellect who flourished in the age of Pope, George Berkeley is one of the most distinguished. Born in 1685 of poor parents, in a cottage near Dysert Castle, in Kilkenny, he went up to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700, and there, first as student, and afterwards as tutor, he remained for thirteen years. In the course of them he was ordained, and gained a fellowship. In 1709 he published his _Essay on Vision_, and in the following year the _Principles of Human Knowledge_, works which thus early made him famous as a philosopher, and a puzzle to many who failed to understand his 'new principle' with regard to the existence of matter.

In 1712 Berkeley visited England, probably for the first time, and was introduced to the London wits. Already in these youthful days there was in him much of that magic power which some men exercise unconsciously and irresistibly. Swift felt the spell, called Berkeley a great philosopher, and spoke of him to all the Ministers; while Atterbury, upon being asked what he thought of him, exclaimed: 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels till I saw this gentleman.' An incident occurred, it is conjectured during the course of this visit, which led to memorable results. He dined once with Swift at Mrs. Vanhomrigh's, and met her daughter Hester. Many years later, _Vanessa_ destroyed the will she had made in Swift's favour, and left half of her property to Berkeley. While in London the future bishop was warmly welcomed by Steele, and wrote several essays for him in the _Guardian_ against the Freethinkers, and especially against Anthony Collins (1676-1729), whose arguments in his _Discourse on Freethinking_ (1713) are ridiculed in the _Scriblerus Memoirs_. Collins, it may be observed here, wrote a treatise several years later on the _Grounds of the Christian Religion_ (1724) which called forth thirty-five answers. During this visit Berkeley also published one of his most original works, _Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_, a book marked by that consummate beauty of style for which he is distinguished.

In November, 1713, the Earl of Peterborough was sent on an embassage to the King of Sicily, and on Swift's recommendation took Berkeley with him as his chaplain and secretary. Ten months were spent on this occasion in France and Italy. Another continental tour followed, in the course of which Berkeley wrote to Arbuthnot of his ascent of Vesuvius, and to Pope of his life at Naples. Five years were spent abroad, and he returned to England to learn of the failure of the South Sea Scheme. In his _Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721), the main argument is the obvious one, that national salvation is only to be secured by individual uprightness. He deplores 'the trifling vanity of apparel' which we have learned from France, advocates the revival of sumptuary laws, considers that we are 'doomed to be undone' by luxury, and by the want of public spirit, and declares that 'neither Venice nor Paris, nor any other town in any part of the world ever knew such an expensive ruinous folly as our masquerade.'

In the summer of this year he was again in London, and Pope asked him to spend a week in his 'Tusculum.' One promotion followed another until Berkeley became Dean of Derry, with an income of from £1,500 to £2,000 a year. He did not hold this dignified position long, having conceived the magnificent but Utopian idea of founding a Missionary College in the Bermudas--the 'Summer Isles' celebrated in the verse of Waller and of Marvell--for the conversion of America.

And now Berkeley exhibited his amazing power of influencing other men. The members of the Scriblerus Club laughed at the Dean's project, but so powerful was his eloquence, that 'those who came to scoff remained to subscribe.' Moreover, with Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister, he actually obtained a grant from the State of £20,000 in order to carry out the project, the king gave a charter, and to crown all, Sir Robert put his own name down for £200 on the list of subscribers. 'The scheme,' says Mr. Balfour, 'seems now so impracticable that we may well wonder how any single person, let alone the representatives of a whole nation, could be found to support it. In order that religion and learning might flourish in America, the seeds of them were to be cast in some rocky islets severed from America by nearly six hundred miles of stormy ocean. In order that the inhabitants of the mainland and of the West Indian colonies might equally benefit by the new university, it was to be placed in such a position that neither could conveniently reach it.'[60] Berkeley, who had recently married, left England for Rhode Island, where he stayed for about three years and wrote _Alciphron_ (1732), in which he attacks the freethinkers under the title of _Minute Philosophers_. Then on learning from Walpole that the promised money 'would most undoubtedly be paid as soon as suits public convenience' which would be never, he returned to England, and through the Queen's influence was made Bishop of Cloyne. In that diocese eighteen years of his life were spent. In the course of them he published the _Querist_ (1735-1737), an _Essay on the Social State of Ireland_ (1744), and, in the same year, _Siris_, which contains the bishop's famous recipe for the use of tar water followed by much philosophical disquisition. The remedy, which was afterwards praised by the poet Dyer in _The Fleece_, became instantly popular. 'We are now mad about the water,' Horace Walpole wrote; 'the book contains every subject from tar water to the Trinity; however, all the women read it, and understand it no more than if it were intelligible.' Editions of _Siris_ followed each other in rapid succession, and it was translated into French and German. The work is that of an enthusiast, and it should be read not for its argument, but for its wealth of suggestiveness, and for what Mr. Balfour calls 'a certain quality of moral elevation and speculative diffidence alien both to the literature and the life of the eighteenth century.' Berkeley had himself the profoundest faith in the panacea which he advocated. 'From my representing tar water,' he writes, 'as good for so many things, some, perhaps, many conclude it is good for nothing. But charity obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, howsoever it may be taken. Men may conjecture and object as they please, but I appeal to time and experience.'

In his latter days Berkeley, feeling his health failing, desired to resign his bishopric and retire to Oxford, and there--while still bishop of Cloyne, for the king would not accept his resignation--the philosopher, who was blest, to use Shakespeare's fine epithet, with a 'tender-hefted nature,' passed away in 1753, leaving behind him one of the most fragrant of memories.

That Berkeley was a philosophical thinker from his earliest manhood is evident from his _Commonplace Book_ published for the first time in the Clarendon Press edition of his works (vol. iv., pp. 419-502).

He delighted in recondite thought as much as most young men delight in action, and as a philosopher he is said to have commenced his studies with Locke, whose famous _Essay_ appeared in 1690. Of Plato, too, Berkeley was an ardent admirer, and the spirit of Plato pervades his works. His _Essay towards a New Theory of Vision_ contains some intimations of the famous metaphysical theory which was developed a little later in the _Treatise on Human Knowledge_.

A good deal of foolish ridicule was excited by this book. Berkeley was supposed to maintain the absurd paradox that sensible things do not exist at all. The reader will remember how Dr. Johnson undertook to refute the postulate by striking his foot against a stone, while James Beattie (1735-1803), the poet and moral philosopher, in a volume for which he was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, denounced Berkeley's philosophy as 'scandalously absurd.' 'If,' he writes, 'I were permitted to propose one clownish question, I would fain ask ... Where is the harm of my believing that if I were to fall down yonder precipice and break my neck, I should be no more a man of this world? My neck, Sir, may be an idea to you, but to me it is a reality, and a very important one too. Where is the harm of my believing that if in this severe weather I were to neglect to throw (what you call) the idea of a coat over the ideas of my shoulders, the idea of cold would produce the idea of such pain and disorder as might possibly terminate in my real death? What great offence shall I commit against God or man, church or state, philosophy or common sense if I continue to believe that material food will nourish me, though the idea of it will not, that the real sun will warm and enlighten me, though the liveliest idea of him will do neither; and that if I would obtain here peace of mind and self-approbation, I must not only form ideas of compassion, justice and generosity, but also really exert those virtues in external performance?'[61]

Beattie continues in this foolish strain to throw contempt upon a system which he had not taken the trouble to understand, and upon one of the sanest and noblest of English philosophers, and he does so without a thought that the absurdity is due to his own ignorance and not to the theory of Berkeley. The author of the _Minstrel_ was an honest man and a respectable poet, but he prided himself too much on what he called common sense, and failed to see that in the search after truth other and even higher faculties may be also needed. Moreover, Berkeley, so far from being an enemy to common sense, endeavours, as he says, to vindicate it, although in so doing, he 'may perhaps be obliged to use some _ambages_ and ways of speech not common.' A significant passage may be quoted from the _Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous_ (1713) in illustration of his method and style so far indeed as a short extract can illustrate an argument sustained by a long course of reasoning.

'_Phil._ As I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things,
so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be
really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really
exist is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or
abstract even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from
its being perceived. Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and
the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that
I know. And I should not have known them but that I perceived
them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are
immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are
ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; their existence
therefore consists in being perceived; when therefore they are
actually perceived there can be no doubt of their existence....
I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those
things I actually see and feel.

'_Hyl._ Not so fast, _Philonous_; you say you cannot conceive
how sensible things should exist without the mind. Do you not?

'_Phil._ I do.

'_Hyl._ Supposing you were annihilated, cannot you conceive it
possible that things perceivable by sense may still exist?

'_Phil._ I can; but then it must be in another mind. When I deny
sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my
mind in particular, but all minds. Now, it is plain they have an
existence exterior to my mind; since I find them by experience
to be independent of it. There is therefore some other mind
wherein they exist, during the intervals between the times of my
perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and
would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true
with regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily
follows there is an _omnipresent, eternal Mind_, which knows and
comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a
manner, and according to such rules, as He Himself hath
ordained, and are by us termed the _Laws of Nature_.'

'Truth is the cry of all,' says Berkeley in the final paragraph
of _Siris_, 'but the game of a few. Certainly, where it is the
chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views,
nor is it contented with a little ardour, active perhaps to
pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a
real progress in knowledge, must dedicate his age as well as
youth, the latter growth as well as firstfruits at the altar of
truth.'

Elsewhere in this famous treatise he writes:

'It cannot be denied that with respect to the universe of things
we in this mortal state are like men educated in Plato's cave,
looking on shadows with our backs turned to the light. But
though our light be dim and our situation bad, yet if the best
use be made of both, perhaps something may be seen. Proclus, in
his commentary on the theology of Plato, observes there are two
sorts of philosophers. The one placed body first in the order of
beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon,
supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that
body most really or principally exists, and all other things in
a secondary sense and by virtue of that. Others making all
corporeal things to be dependent upon soul or mind, think this
to exist in the first place, and primary senses and the being of
bodies to be altogether derived from, and presuppose that of the
mind.'

This was Berkeley's creed, and his great aim throughout is to prove the phenomenal nature of the things of sense, or in other words the non-existence of independent matter. He makes, he says, not the least question that the things we see and touch really exist, but what he does question is the existence of matter apart from its perception to the mind. Hobbes said that the body accounted for the mind, and that matter was the deepest thing in the universe, while to Berkeley the only true reality consists in what is spiritual and eternal.

'The great idealist,' says an able writer, 'certainly never denied the existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, he admitted and maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind,' and he adds that the peculiar endowment for which Berkeley was distinguished 'far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher who has succeeded him, was the eye he had _for facts_, and the singular pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon them.'[62]

Pope's age produced a few great masters of style, and among them Berkeley holds an undisputed place. He succeeded, too, in the most difficult department of intellectual labour, since to express abstruse thought in language as beautiful as it is clear is the rarest of gifts.

'His works are beyond dispute the finest models of philosophic style since Cicero. Perhaps they surpass those of the orator, in the wonderful art by which the fullest light is thrown on the most minute and evanescent parts of the most subtle of human conceptions.'[63]

[Sidenote: William Law (1686-1761).]

William Law was born in 1686 at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Sizar in 1705. He obtained a Fellowship, and received holy orders in 1711, but having made a speech offensive to the heads of houses, he was degraded. Law believed in the divine right of kings, and on the death of Queen Anne, declared his principles as a non-juror. In 1717 he published his first controversial work, _Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor_; Hoadly, the famous bishop, having, in his opponent's judgment, uttered lax and latitudinarian views with regard to the Church of which he was one of the chief pastors. These _Letters_ have been highly praised for wit as well as for argument, and Dean Hook, writing of the Bangorian Controversy in his _Church Dictionary_, states that 'Law's _Letters_ have never been answered and may, indeed, be regarded as unanswerable.' Law was also the most powerful assailant of Warburton's _Divine Legation_, which he opposed with a burning zeal that was not always wise. But as a controversialist he was an infinitely stronger man than his opponent, and unlike Warburton, he never debased controversy by scurrility, which the bishop generally found a more potent weapon than argument.

On the publication, in 1723, of Dr. Mandeville's _Fable of the Bees_, it was vigorously attacked by Law. In this masterly pamphlet, instead of attempting to refute the physician by showing that virtue is more profitable to the State than vice, and that, therefore, private vices are not public benefits, Law takes a higher ground, and asserts that morality is not a question of profit and loss, but of conscience. Mandeville maintains that man is a mere animal governed by his passions; his opponent, on the other hand, argues that man is created in the image of God, that virtue 'is a law to which even the divine nature is subject,' and that human nature is fitted to rise to the angels, while Mandeville would lower it to the brutes.

John Sterling, writing to F. D. Maurice of the first section of Law's remarks, says: 'I have never seen in our language the elementary grounds of a rational ideal philosophy, as opposed to empiricism, stated with nearly the same clearness, simplicity, and force,' and it was at Sterling's suggestion that Maurice published a new edition of Law's argument with an introductory essay (1844).

The following passage from the _Remarks on the Fable of the Bees_ will illustrate Law's method as a polemic:

'Deists and freethinkers are generally considered as
unbelievers; but upon examination they will appear to be men of
the most resigned and implicit faith in the world; they would
believe _transubstantiation_, but that it implies a believing in
God; for they never resign their reason, but when it is to yield
to something that opposes salvation. For the Deist's creed has
as many articles as the Christian's, and requires a much greater
suspension of our reason to believe them. So that if to believe
things upon no authority, or without any reason, be an argument
of credulity, the freethinker will appear to be the most easy,
credulous creature alive. In the first place, he is to believe
almost all the same articles to be false which the Christian
believes to be true.

'Now, it may easily be shown that it requires stronger acts of
faith to believe these articles to be false, than to believe
them to be true. For, taking faith to be an assent of the mind
to some proposition, of which we have no certain knowledge, it
will appear that the Deist's faith is much stronger, and has
more of credulity in it, than the Christian's. For instance, the
Christian believes the resurrection of the dead, because he
finds it supported by such evidence and authority as cannot
possibly be higher, supposing the thing was true; and he does no
more violence to his reason in believing it, than in supposing
that God may intend to do some things, which the reason of man
cannot conceive how they will be effected.

'On the contrary, the Deist believes there will be no
resurrection. And how great is his faith, for he pretends to no
evidence or authority to support it; it is a pure naked assent
of his mind to what he does not know to be true, and of which
nobody has, or can give him, any full assurance. So that the
difference between a Christian and a Deist does not consist in
this, that the one assents to things unknown, and the other does
not; but in this, that the Christian assents to things unknown
on account of evidence; the other assents to things unknown
without any evidence at all. Which shows that the Christian is
the rational believer and the Deist the blind bigot.'

It is probable that Law, like other writers on the orthodox side, did not sufficiently take into account the service rendered by the Deists in arousing a spirit of inquiry. Free-thinking is right thinking, and 'it was a result of the Deistic controversy, which went far to make up many evils in it, that in the end it widened and enlarged Christian thought.'[64]

The author's next and weakest work, _On the Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments_ (1726), is mentioned elsewhere.[65]

In the same year he published _Christian Perfection_, a profoundly earnest but puritanically narrow work, in which our earthly life is regarded simply as the road to another. 'There is nothing that deserves a serious thought,' he writes, 'but how to get out of the world and make it a right passage to our eternal state.' No man ever practised what he preached with more sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager to exercise.

Literature _quâ_ literature Law regarded with contempt, and he is said to have looked upon the study even of Milton as waste of time. Yet his biographer states what seems likely enough, considering the fine qualities of Law's own writings, that 'no author was ever a favourite with him, unless he was a man of literary merit.'

In 1727, and probably before that date, Law held the position of tutor to Edward Gibbon, whose famous son, the historian, in his _Autobiography_, gives to him the high praise of having left in the family 'the reputation of a worthy and pious man, who believed all that he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.'

Law accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and it is conjectured that during this residence at the university he wrote what Gibbon justly called his 'master work,' _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life_ (1729), the most impressive book of its class produced in the eighteenth century. The historian's father was a man of feeble character. He left Cambridge without a degree, and went on his travels, the tutor meanwhile remaining in the family house at Putney, where he seems to have gathered round him a number of disciples.

The _Serious Call_ had an immediate and strong influence on many thoughtful men, and Law's book stimulated in no common measure the religious life of the country. John Wesley spoke of it as a treatise hardly to be excelled in the English tongue 'either for beauty of expression, or for justness and depth of thought.' Whitefield, Venn, and Thomas Scott, the commentator, acknowledged their indebtedness to the work, and Dr. Johnson, speaking of his youthful days, said: 'I became a sort of lax _talker_ against religion, for I did not much _think_ against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, when I took up Law's _Serious Call to a Holy Life_, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), but I found Law quite an over-match for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest.' The first Lord Lyttelton, the historian and friend of Thomson, is said to have taken up the book one night at bed-time, and to have read it through before he went to bed; but, perhaps, the most unimpeachable evidence in its favour comes from the pen of Gibbon, who writes: 'Mr. Law's precepts are rigid, but they are founded on the Gospel. His satire is sharp, but it is drawn from the knowledge of human life, and many of his portraits are not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère. If he finds a spark of piety in his reader's mind he will soon kindle it to a flame.'

Law's art as a portrait painter will be seen in the following sketch of Flavia:

'_Flavia_ would be a miracle of piety if she was but half so
careful of her soul as she is of her body. The rising of a
_pimple_ on her face, the sting of a gnat, will make her keep
her room two or three days, and she thinks they are very rash
people that do not take care of things in time. This makes her
so over careful of her health that she never thinks she is well
enough, and so over indulgent that she never can be really well.
So that it costs her a great deal in sleeping draughts and
waking draughts, in spirits for the head, in drops for the
nerves, in cordials for the stomach, and in saffron for her tea.