Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/27

  Sea-Card,' the substance of addresses at two synodal assemblies at Carlisle, on 1 Tim. iv. 16, and Acts xx. 28. The book was published at Oxford in 1619 under the editorship of Thomas Vicars, fellow of Queen's College. Wood also ascribes to Mandevil 'Theological Discourses.'

 MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670?–1733), author of the 'Fable of the Bees,' born about 1670, was a native of Dort (or Dordrecht) in Holland. He pronounced an 'Oratio Scholastics, De Medicina,' upon leaving the Erasmus School at Rotterdam for the university in October 1785. On 23 March 1689 he maintained a thesis at Leyden 'De Brutorum Operationibus,' arguing for the automatism of brutes; and on 30 March 1691 kept an 'inaugural disputation,' 'De Chylosi Vitiata,' at Leyden upon taking his degree as doctor of medicine. Copies of these are in the British Museum; the last is dedicated to his father, 'Michaelo de Mandeville, apud Roterodamenses practice felicissimo.' For some unknown reason he settled in England. According to Hawkins (Life of Johnson, p. 263), he lived in obscure lodgings in London and never acquired much practice. Some Dutch merchants whom he nattered allowed him a pension. He is also said to have been 'hired by the distillers' to write in favour of spirituous liquors. A physician who had married a distiller's daughter told Hawkins that Mandeville was 'a good sort of man,' and quoted him as maintaining that the children of dram-drinking women were 'never afflicted with the rickets.' Mandeville is said to have been coarse and overbearing when he dared, and was probably little respected outside of distilling circles. Lord Macclesfield, however, when chief justice (1710-1718), is said to have often entertained him for the sake of his conversation (, and Lounger's Commonplace Book, by, ii. 306). At Macclesfield's house he met Addison, whom he described as 'a parson in a tye-wig.' Franklin during his first visit to England was introduced to Mandeville, and describes him as the 'soul' of a club held at a tavern and a 'most entertaining, facetious companion' (, Memoirs). He died 21 Jan. 1732-3 (Gent. Mag. for 1733), 'in his sixty-third year' according to the 'Bibliotheque Britannique.'

Mandeville published in 1705 a doggerel poem called 'The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest,' which was piratically reprinted as 'a sixpenny pamphlet,' and sold about the streets as a halfpenny sheet (preface to later edition). In 1714 it was republished anonymously with an 'Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,' and a series of notes, under the title 'The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits.' In 1723 appeared a second edition, with an 'Essay on Charity and Charity Schools,' and a 'Search into the Nature of Society.' The grand jury of Middlesex presented the book as a nuisance in July 1723, and it was denounced in a letter by 'Theophilus Philo-Britannus' in the 'London Journal' of 27 July following. Mandeville replied by a letter to the same journal on 10 Aug., reprinted as a 'Vindication' in later editions. The book was attacked by [q. v.] in his 'General Treatise of Morality,' 1724 ; by [q. v.] in 'Vice and Luxury Public Mischiefs' (1724); by [q. v.] in 'Remarks upon &hellip; the Fable of the Bees;' by (1694-1746) [q. v.] in 'Hibernicus's Letters' (1725-7), and by (1691-1756) [q. v.] in his Άρετηλογία (1728), fraudulently published as his own by Alexander Innes. Campbell (or Innes) challenged Mandeville to redeem a promise which he had made that he would burn the book if it were proved to be immoral. An advertisement of the Άρετηλογία was followed by a paragraph stating that the author of the 'Fable' had, upon reading this challenge, burnt his own book solemnly at the bonfire before St. James's Gate on 1 March 1728. Mandeville ridiculed this ingenious fiction in the preface to a second part of the 'Fable of the Bees' added to later editions. The sixth edition appeared in 1729, the ninth in 1755, and it has been often reprinted. Berkeley replied to Mandeville in the second dialogue of 'Alciphron' (1732), to which Mandeville replied in 'A Letter to Dion' in the same year. (1715-1766) [q. v.], in his 'Essay upon Shaftesbury's Characteristics' (1751), also attacks Mandeville as well as Shaftesbury.

Mandeville gave great offence by this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. It was long popular, and later critics have pointed out the real acuteness of the writer as well as the vigour of his style, especially remarkable in a foreigner. His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economical fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced 'private vices,' and assuming with the