befall them, was to keep their hops and barley upon their hands, and the more they yearly consumed of them, the more they reckoned the country to flourish. The government had made very wise regulations concerning the returns that were made for their exports, encouraged very much the importation of salt and pepper, and laid heavy duties on everything that was not well seasoned, and might any wise obstruct the sale of their own hops and barley. Those at the helm, when they acted in public, showed themselves on all accounts exempt and wholly divested from thirst, made several laws to prevent the growth of it, and punish the wicked who openly dared to quench it. If you examined them in their private persons, and pry'd narrowly into their lives and conversations, they seemed to be more fond, or at least drank larger draughts of small beer than others, but always under pretence that the mending of complexions required greater quantities of liquor in them, than it did in those they ruled over; and that what they had chiefly at heart, without any regard to themselves, was to procure great plenty of small beer among the subjects in general, and a great demand for their hops and barley. As nobody was debarred from small beer, the clergy made use of it as well as the laity, and some of them very plentifully, yet all of them desired to be thought less thirsty by their functions than others, and never would own that they drank any but to mend their complexions. In their religious assemblies they were more sincere; for as soon as they came there, they all openly confessed, the clergy as well as the laity, from the highest to the lowest, that they were thirsty, that mending their complexions was what they minded the least, and that all their hearts were set upon small beer and quenching their thirst, whatever they might pretend to the contrary. What was remarkable is, that to have laid hold of those truths to anyone's prejudice, and made use of those confessions out of their temples, would have been counted very impertinent, and everybody thought it a heinous affront to be called thirsty, though you had seen him drink small beer by whole gallons. The chief topic of their preachers was the great evil of thirst, and the folly there was in quenching it. They exhorted their hearers to resist the temptations of it, inveighed against small beer, and often told them it was poison, if they drank it with pleasure, or with any other design than to mend their complexions. In their acknowledgments to the gods, they thanked them for the plenty of comfortable small beer they had received from them, notwithstanding they had so little deserved it, and continually quenched their thirst with it; whereas they were so thoroughly satisfied that it was given them for a better use. Having begged pardon for these offences, they desired the gods to lessen their thirst, and give them strength to resist the importunities of it; yet in the midst of their sorest repentance, and most humble supplications, they never forgot small beer, and prayed that they might continue to have it in great plenty, with a solemn promise, that however neglectful soever they might hitherto have been in this point, they would for the future not drink a drop of it with any other design than to mend their complexions. These were standing petitions put together to last; and having continued to be made use of without any alterations for several hundred years together, it was thought by some, that the gods, who understood futurity, and knew that the same promise they heard in June would be made to them the January following, did not rely much more on these vows, than we do on those waggish inscriptions by which men offer us their goods, "To-day for money, and to-morrow for nothing." They often began their prayers very mystically, and spoke many things in a spiritual sense; yet, they never were so abstract from the world in them, as to end one without beseeching the gods to bless and prosper the brewing trade in all its branches, and for the good of the whole, more and more to increase the consumption of hops and barley. LORD SHAFTESBURY [Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was born in 1671. His education was superintended by Locke, which probably accounts for his reaction from the Lockian philosophy. He was at Winchester from 1683 to 1686. He sat for a time in Parliament, but for the most part he lived the life of a student in ill-health. He was a traveller; he visited Holland, and made the acquaintance of Bayle, and in 1708 he began to publish pamphlets, mainly on ethical subjects. The most important of these is the Enquiry concerning Virtue or Merit. They are reprinted in a collection entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711). In 1709 he married, and in 1712 he died. A fine edition of the Characteristics was printed by Baskerville in 1773, and the first volume has been more recently edited by Mr. Hatch. Two or three specimens of his correspondence have also been printed; the most interesting is the Letters written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (1716). The student may consult Professor Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Professor Sidgwick's History of Ethics, and Mr. Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.] IN the essentials of their philosophical position, Shaftesbury and Henry More are at one. Both represent the refusal, the characteristically English refusal, to accept the formulas of Hobbes and Locke as the last word on things human and divine. Both point to the unexplored fields, the unexplained residuum of the spiritual life, which those formulas fail to touch. Yet in all else they are each other's antipodes. More is eminently of the seventeenth century-poet, dreamer, Platonist, abhorrent of system, and ever hunting the shy, elusive fringes of truth, he presents a world full of mystery and colour, rich with gracious half-lights and reverent shadows. Not so Shaftesbury: sceptical where More is credulous, clear where More is vague, he wields for imagination the dry light of analysis, and champions the spiritual in a tone that robs it of its spirituality. He is one of the first embodiments of the eighteenth century spirit in speculation, and has all the merits and most of the defects which we habitually associate with that spirit. man. He writes in a style which is consummately easy and lucid. There are none of those obscurities and experimental reaches of thought which in other thinkers one sometimes finds so puzzling and so suggestive; his meaning may not be very profound, but it is at least expressed for the better understanding of the plain He brings into English prose an order and a clearness of which it was beginning to stand in some need. The worst that can be said of him is that he is terribly affected--" genteel" was Charles Lamb's epithet. He is not always in buckram; he will unbend to you; but all the same his treatises invariably smack of the superior person, the man of birth, debarred by circumstances from his natural pursuit of politics, and condescending to while away a part of his too abundant leisure in unravelling some niceties of the intellect. Unwilling to appear a pedant, he falls into the opposite vices of desultoriness and superficiality. As a thinker Shaftesbury made definite and prominent an important principle of morals-that man is not a solitary unit, to be treated in vacuo as a self-contained whole; but rather a centre of forces in a complex society, dependent on others at every turn, with desires and modes of conduct inextricably entangled with theirs. Or, to use a phraseology nearer his own, Shaftesbury taught that man's benevolent impulses are as fundamental and natural, as much a part of man himself, as those which are selfregarding and that an ethical scheme which takes into account the one and neglects the other must needs be one-sided and incomplete. He struck a real blot in the reasoning of his predecessors, and laid down the lines on which English psychological ethics were to proceed for some time to come. : Shaftesbury's moral doctrine is positive enough, but he had his negative side also. The element of analysis, of criticism, in him led him into the camp of the unorthodox, and he ranks among the able, if transient, school of English Deists. Hence his influence over French thought, as French thought culminated in the worship of the Supreme Reason; while he is at one with Voltaire, as well as with certain brilliant writers, both French and English, of our own day, in finding the true solvent of superstition and fanaticism, not in persecution, but in humour. E. K. CHAMBERS. ON ENTHUSIASM THUS, my Lord, there are many panics in mankind, besides merely that of fear. And thus is religion also panic, when enthusiasm of any kind gets up, as oft, on melancholy occasions it will; for vapours naturally rise, and in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities, or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions happen in nature, storms, earthquakes, or other amazing prodigies at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it. For, to apply a serious remedy, and bring the sword, or fasces, as a cure, must make the case more melancholy, and increase the very cause of the distemper. To forbid men's natural fears, and to endeavour the overpowering them by other fears, must needs be a most unnatural method. The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand, and instead of caustics, incisions, and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with a kind sympathy, entering into the concern of the people, and taking, as it were, their passion upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it. This was ancient policy: and hence, as a notable author of our nation expresses it, it is necessary a people should have a public leading in Religion. For to deny the magistrate a worship, or take away a National Church, is as mere enthusiasm as the notion which sets up persecution. For why should there not be public walks as well as private gardens ? Why not public libraries as well as private education and home-tutors? But to prescribe bounds to fancy and speculation, to regulate men's apprehensions, and religious beliefs or fears, to suppress by violence the natural passion of enthusiasm, or to endeavour to ascertain it, or reduce it to one species, or bring it under VOL. III 2 G |