attacks which the ministers made upon him, or even from the heavy guns of Bishop Berkeley and William Law. They started from assumptions about human nature and human origins which he had dismissed as completely as most biologists to-day dismiss the assumptions of Mr. Bryan. He was a very modern type of man: philosophical bishops amused him. But Mr. Kaye, in his admirably learned edition of the "Fable."[1] has made a large collection of tributes from later writers, which show the wide and deep furrow that Mandeville drew in the thought of two centuries. Most of them are by solid men.
Samuel Johnson said: "I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago . . . he opened my views into real life very much." Crabb Robinson called the "Fable" "the wickedest, cleverest book in the English language." Lord Macaulay said: "If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions it is . . . extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in 'The Fable of the Bees.'" William Hazlitt said: "I like Mandeville better [than La Rochefoucauld]. He goes more into his subject." Robert Browning, in "Parleyings" saluted Mandeville as the sage in whom truth triumphs through the harmonious combination of good with evil.
Now, if you look into the ordinary textbook by which English literature is introduced to students in the United States, the probability is that you will not find Bernard Mandeville so much as mentioned, though the author of "Marco Polo's Travels" usually finds a place. In a history of eighteenth century literature,
- ↑ The Fable of the Bees, New York, 1924, two vols.
