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 received by the Duke of Berwick, then encamped on the frontier of Piedmont. He declined to take advantage of French civility by spending the winter at Montpelier, and therefore went to Naples, where he settled for the rest of his life. He died there 15 Feb. 1713 (4 Feb. 1712–13 according to English reckoning), dying with peaceful resignation, according to the report of an attendant, Mr. Crell. His body was sent to England. He left one son, Anthony Ashley, the fourth earl of Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury was a man of lofty and ardent character, forced by ill-health to abandon politics for literature. He was liberal, though much fretted by the difficulty of keeping out of debt. He was resolved, as he tells his steward, not to be a slave to his estates, and never again to be ‘poorly rich.’ He supported several young men of promise at the university or elsewhere. He allowed a pension of 20l. a year to the deist Toland, after Toland's surreptitious publication of his papers, though he appears to have dropped it in his fit of economy in 1704. He gives exceedingly careful directions for regulating his domestic affairs during his absence. His letters to his young friends are full of moral and religious advice, and the ‘Shaftesbury Papers’ show many traces of his practical benevolence to them. He went to church and took the sacrament regularly, respecting religion though he hated the priests. He is a typical example of the whig aristocracy of the time, and with better health might have rivalled his grandfather's fame.

Shaftesbury is a very remarkable figure in the literary history of his time. The ‘Characteristics’ give unmistakable indications of religious scepticism, especially in allusions to the Old Testament. He was accordingly attacked as a deist by Leland, Warburton, Berkeley, and many other christian apologists. He had been influenced by Bayle, and shares or exaggerates the ordinary dislike of the whig nobles to church principles. His heterodoxy excited the prejudice of many reasoners who might have welcomed him as an ally upon fundamental questions. As a philosopher he had no distinct system, and repudiates metaphysics. He revolted against the teaching of Locke, to which there are some contemptuous references in the ‘Advice to an Author’ (pt. iii. sect. i.) (the first and eighth of the ‘Letters to a Student’ give an explicit statement). He was probably much influenced by the ‘Cambridge Platonists,’ especially Whichcote and Cudworth, and shows many points of affinity to Cumberland. His cosmopolitan and classical training, and the traditional code of honour of his class, are discernible in all his writings. His special idol was Plato, whom he endeavoured to imitate in the ‘Moralists.’ Hurd and Monboddo are enraptured with his performance as unsurpassed in the language. Opponents, especially the shrewd cynic Mandeville, regarded him as a pretentious and high-flown declaimer; but his real elevation of feeling gives a serious value to his ethical speculations, the most systematic account of which is in the ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue.’ The phrase ‘moral sense’ which occurs in that treatise became famous in the Scotch school of philosophy of which Hutcheson, a disciple of Shaftesbury's, was the founder. He influenced in various ways all the chief ethical writers of the century. Butler, in the preface to his sermons, speaks highly of Shaftesbury (the only contemporary to whom he explicitly refers) for showing the ‘natural obligation of virtue.’ Although, according to Butler's teaching, Shaftesbury's account of the conscience is inadequate, and his theology too vague and optimistic to supply the needed sanction, his attack upon an egoistic utilitarianism falls in with Butler's principles. Shaftesbury, on the other hand, was attacked both by the followers of Clarke's intellectual system, as in John Balguy's ‘Letter to a Deist’ (1726), and by the thoroughgoing utilitarians, especially Thomas Brown (1778–1820) [q. v.] in his ‘Essay upon the Characteristics,’ as giving so vague a criterion of morality as to reduce it to a mere matter of taste. Shaftesbury's æsthetical speculations, given chiefly in the ‘Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules,’ are of some interest, and anticipate some points in Lessing's ‘Laokoon’ (see, Lessing, i. 249, 266).

Shaftesbury's style, always laboured, often bombastic, and curiously contrasted with the simplicity of his contemporary Addison, has led to the neglect of his writings. He was, however, admired by such critics as Hurd and Blair, though Gray (letter to Stonehewer, 18 Aug. 1758) speaks of him with contempt as a writer whose former vogue has become scarcely intelligible. His influence on the continent was remarkable. One of Diderot's first publications was an ‘Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu’ (1745), a free translation from Shaftesbury's ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue,’ and in 1746 he published the ‘Pensées Philosophiques,’ a development of Shaftesbury's scepticism, which was burnt by the parliament of Paris (see, Diderot, i. 42–47). The ‘Characteristics’ were studied by Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Wieland (see, Lessing, i. 115, 187, ii. 296), and influenced the development of German speculation. Leibnitz, to whom Shaftesbury sent a copy of the ‘Characteristics,’ said that he