—that a well-dressed gentleman, presumably the author, had been seen carrying "The Fable of the Bees" to the public bonfire. It was said that he had been hired by the distillers to write in behalf of spirituous liquors, and it was given out as his opinion that children of dram-drinking women were never afflicted with rickets. It was said that he lived in obscure lodgings and had little practise as a physician—both serious tokens of moral turpitude in the eyes of the poor in spirit.
Our young countryman, Ben Franklin, on his Wanderjahr in London in 1724, became intimate with a surgeon by the name of Lyons, who took him around to a pale ale house, The Horns, in Cheapside, and introduced him to Dr. Mandeville, who had a club there. Franklin in his autobiography reported that Mandeville was the "soul" of the club and "a most facetious, entertaining companion." But we know that Franklin himself, in those days, was no better than he should have been.
One sees how the legend of the vulgar tavern wit got afoot.
As a matter of fact, at the outset of his literary career, Mandeville himself was at small pains to be taken seriously. His "Fable," as he first launched it on the town in 1705, under the title of "The Grumbling Hive," was not, as it is now, a magnum opus, a life-work—comparable with Montaigne's "Essays," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Hobbes' "Leviathan," Locke on "Human Understanding" or Shaftesbury's "Charactersticks."
He threw out at first but the germ or nucleus about which his meditations were to agglomerate for the next generation. The germ is but a poem of some four
