66 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
an Enquiry after Wit, by Dr. Wotton; and Reflections upon a 
Letter concerning Enthusiasm, now generally credited to Dr. Ed¬ 
ward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester. All were alert to the possi¬ 
bility of the author ^s implied reflection upon the English clergy 
as well as his open attack on the Cevenol peasants. Shaftesbury 
was swift to come to the defense of his cherished doctrine with 
Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Rumor 
(1709). What, apparently, is another attack is that attributed to 
M. Astell entitled An Enquiry after Wit: wherein the trifling 
argument and impious raillery of the late Earl of Shaftesbury in 
his Letter concerning Enthusiasm . . . are fully answered.^^ 
Doubtless the most formidable opponent of Shaftesbury was the 
arch cynic Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) whose A Search 
into the Nature of Society (1723), added to the second edition of 
the Fable of the Bees, launched his attack. As the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury representative of Hobbes he sees in man a ‘^Compound of 
Evil Passions’’, makes a benefit of luxury, a vice of natural pas¬ 
sions, and a necessity of crime. “Two systems”, he says, “cannot 
be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine.” By continuing 
his attacks in the Dialogues, published as a second part of the 
Fable of the Bees in 1728, Mandeville, as Cleomenes, represents 
Shaftesbury as an enemy of revealed religion. 
But Mandeville’s attack was too coarse to be tolerated by self- 
respecting and nation-loving subjects, and again Shaftesbury had 
his defenders in rapid succession. John Dennis’s Vice and Luxury 
Public Mischiefs (1724), William Law’s Remarks on the Fable of 
the Bees (1724), Richard Piddes’s A General Treatise on Morality 
(1724), Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of our 
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and his Observations upon the 
Fable of the Bees (1725-27), Archibald Campbell’s Aretelogia 
(1728), and parts of Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732), and John 
Brown’s Essays on the Characteristics (1751) and An Estimate 
(1757) are at times as much pro Shaftesbury as they are anti 
Mandeville. 
One of the most effective replies of the whole controversy was 
that of John Bulgay, a follower of Clarke, in A Letter to a Deist 
concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the 
support and improvement which it receives from the Christian 
Revelation (1726). The burden of this rational work is well sum¬ 
marized in its own words: “In short, the question is not, which 
See British Museum Catalogue under Shaftesbury. 
