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Rh 732 SHAFTESBURY year, and yet had much " to dispose of and spend beyond convenient living." He returned to England, much improved in health, in August 1704. But, though he had received immediate benefit from his stay abroad, symptoms of consumption were constantly alarming him, and he gradually became a confirmed invalid. His occu- pations were now almost exclusively literary, and from this time forward he was probably engaged in writing, completing, or revising the treatises which were afterwards included in the Characteristics. He still continued, how- ever, to take a warm interest in politics, both home and foreign, and especially in the war against France, of which he was an enthusiastic supporter. Shaftesbury was nearly forty before he married, and even then he appears to have taken this step at the urgent instigation of his friends, mainly to supply a suc- cessor to the title. The object of his choice (or rather of his second choice, for an earlier project of marriage had shortly before fallen through) was a Miss Jane Ewer, the daughter of a gentleman iu Hertfordshire. The marriage took place in the autumn of 1709, and on February 9, 1710, was born at his house at Reigate, in Surrey, his only child and heir, the fourth earl, to whose manuscript accounts we are in great part indebted for the details of his father's life. The match appears to have been a happy one, though Shaftesbury neither had nor pretended to have much sentiment on the subject of married life. With the exception of a Preface to the Sermons of Dr Whichcote, one of the Cambridge Platonists or latitudin- arians, published in 1698, Shaftesbury appears to have printed nothing himself till the year 1708. About this time the French prophets, as they were called, attracted much attention by the extravagances and follies of which they were guilty. Various remedies of the repressive kind were proposed, but Shaftesbury maintained that their fanaticism was best encountered by '* raillery " and " good- humour." In support of this view he wrote a letter to Lord Somers, dated September 1707 which was published anonymously in the following year, and provoked several replies. In May 1709 ho returned to the subject, and printed another letter, entitled Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. In the same year he also published The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, and in the following year Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author. None of these pieces seem to have been printed either with his name or his initials. In 1711 appeared the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, in three volumes, also without any name or initials on the title-page, and without even the name of a printer. These three handsome volumes contain in addition to the four treatises already mentioned, Miscellaneous Reflections, now first printed, and the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, described as " formerly printed from an imperfect copy, now corrected and published intire," and as "printed first in the year 1699." The declining state of Shaftesbury's health rendered it necessary for him to seek a warmer climate, and in July 1711 he set out for Italy. He settled at Naples in November, and lived there considerably over a year. His principal occupation at this time must have consisted in preparing for the press a second edition of the Character- istics, which appeared in 1713, soon after his death. The copy, most carefully corrected in his own handwriting, is still preserved in the British Museum. He was also engaged, during his stay at Naples, in writing the little treatise (afterwards included in the Cliaracteristics) entitled A Notion of the Historical' Draught or Tall>itnr<- of the Judgment of Hercules, and the letter concerning Design. A little before his death he had also formed a scheme of writing a Discourse on the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Etching, Ac., but when he died he had made but little progress with it. " Medals, and pictures, and antiquities," he writes to Furly, " are our chief entertain- ments here." His conversation was with men of art and science, "the virtuosi of this place." The events preceding the peace of Utrecht, which he regarded as preparing the way for a base desertion of our allies, greatly troubled the last months of Shaftesbury's life. He did not, however, live to see the actual conclu- sion of the treaty (March 31, 1713), as he died the month before, February 4, 1712, O.S. At the time of his death he had not yet completed his forty-second year. His body was brought back by sea to England and buried at St Giles's, the family seat in Dorsetshire. Though he died so long ago, and was one of the earliest of the English moralists, his descendant, the celebrated philanthropist, who died so recently as 1885, was only his great-grandson. Shaftesbury's amiability of character seems to have been one of his principal characteristics. All accounts concur in representing him as full of sweetness and kindliness towards others, though he may sometimes him- self have been the victim of melancholy and despondency. Like Locke he had a peculiar pleasure in bringing forward young men. Amongst these may be especially mentioned Michael Ainsworth, a native of Wimborne St Giles, the young man who was the recipient of the Letters addressed to a student at the university, and who was maintained by him at University College, Oxford. The keen interest which Shaftesbury took in his studies, and the desire that he should be specially fitted for the profession which he had selected, that of a clergyman of the Church of Eng- land, are marked features of the letters. Other proteges were Crell, a young Pole, the two young Furlys, and Harry Wilkinson, a boy who was sent into Furly's office at Rotterdam, and to whom several of the letters still extant in the Record Office are addressed. In the popular mind, Shaftesbury is generally regarded as a writer hostile to religion. But, however short hi.s orthodoxy might fall if tried by the standards of any particular church, his temperament was pre-eminently a religious one. This fact is shown conspicuously in his letters, where he had no reason for making any secret of his opinions. The belief in a God, all-wise, all-just, and all-merciful, governing the world providentially for the best, pervades all his works, his correspondence, and his life. Nor had he any wish to undermine established beliefs, except where he conceived that they conflicted with a truer religion and a purer morality. To the public ordinances of the church he scrupulously conformed. But, unfortunately, there were many things both in the teaching and the practice of the ecclesiastics of that day which were calculated to repel men of sober judgment and high principle. These evil tendencies in the popular presentation of Christianity undoubtedly begot in Shaftesbury's mind a certain amount of repug- nance and contempt to some of the doctrines of Christianity itself ; and, cultivating, almost of set purpose, his sense of the ridiculous, he was too apt to assume towards such doctrines and their teachers a tone of raillery and banter, which sometimes even approaches grimace. But, whatever might be Shaftesbury's speculative opinions or his mode of expressing them, all witnesses concur in bearing testimony to the elevation and purity of his life and aims. Molesworth, who had no special reason for flattering him, speaks of him as "possessing right reason in a more eminent degree than the rest of man- kind," and of his character as " the highest that the per- fection of human nature is capable of." Even Warburton, in his dedication of the Divine Legation to the free- thinkers, is compelled to " own that this lord had many