BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EVIDENCE OF THE VOGUE OF 
SHAFTESBURY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
William E. Alderman 
The importance of the “contributions of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 
Third Earl of Shaftesbury, to the science of ethics has long been 
recognized and frequently elaborated, both in English and in Ger¬ 
man. Strangely enough, however, he has been notoriously neg¬ 
lected as a writer whose teachings entered largely into the con¬ 
sciousness of his century, and who, consequently, was a potent 
force in suggesting the content of a large body of English liter¬ 
ature. So definitive a work as the Cambridge History of English 
Literature profeses to be allows slightly less than two pages in its 
main entry^ to an enumeration of his works and a partial cata¬ 
loguing of his ideas. The utter disregard of certain writers is 
even more noticeable.^ Only a very few authors of histories and 
.handbooks give him the place of eminence which is indubitably 
his.® 
It has long been the custom to trace a certain bent of the eight¬ 
eenth century temper either immediately and wholly, in its be¬ 
ginnings, to certain poems of the preceding period, or largely, in its 
later developments, to certain foreign influences which, as time 
went on, became operative. To deny the partial truth of either 
of these points of view would be quite contrary to the spirit and 
method of this present study; but to suggest that certain poems 
of the seventeenth century have been credited with greater genera¬ 
tive power than they, of themselves, possessed, and that certain 
foreign ideas found their counterparts already firmly intrenched in 
English thought and literature, is quite a different matter. 
The present study, however, does not aim to suggest an elaborate 
philosophical background to the moods that mark the beginnings 
of romanticism, or to establish definitively the thesis that ideas 
identical with those to which Rousseau gave such brilliant state- 
iVol. IX, p. 334 ff. 
^ The index to English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, by T. S. Perry, contains 
not so much as a single reference to Shaftesbury. 
“ Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature is perhaps the most complimentary. 
