Atterbury was exiled in June, 1723. On reaching Calais he heard that Bolingbroke had just arrived there on his way to England, having had a royal pardon. 'Then I am exchanged,' he said.
The pathetic story of his banishment, and of his devoted daughter's illness and voyage to the south of France, where after a union of a few hours, she died in her father's arms, is full of the most touching details, and may be read in Atterbury's correspondence. 'She is gone,' the bishop wrote, 'and I must follow her. When I do, may my latter end be like hers! It was my business to have taught her to die; instead of it, she has taught me.' Like Fielding's account of his Voyage to Lisbon, the letters give a picture of the time, and of travelling discomforts and difficulties of which we, in these more fortunate days, know nothing. The bishop, who did not long survive his daughter, died in 1732, but before the end came he defended himself admirably from the accusation of Oldmixon, a libeller who stands in the pillory of the Dunciad, that he had helped to garble Clarendon's History. The body was carried to England and privately buried by the side of his daughter in Westminster Abbey. The eloquence of Atterbury's sermons—there are four volumes of them in print—has not secured to them a lasting place in literature, but they are distinguished by purity of style, and have enough of unction to make them highly effective as pulpit discourses. In book form, too, they were for a long time popular, and reached an eighth edition about thirty years after the bishop's death. The eloquent sermon on the death of Lady Cutts endows the lady with such an array of virtues, that one is inclined to wonder how so many rare qualities could have been exhibited in so brief a life:
'She excelled in all the characters that belonged to her, and was in a great measure equal to all the obligations that she lay under. She was devout without superstition; strict, without ill humour; good-natured, without weakness; cheerful, without levity; regular, without affectation. She was to her husband the best of wives, the most agreeable of companions, and most faithful of friends; to her servants the best of mistresses; to her relations extremely respectful; to her inferiors very obliging; and by all that knew her, either nearly or at a distance, she was reckoned and confessed to be one of the best of women. And yet all this goodness and all this excellence was bounded within the compass of eighteen years and as many days; for no longer was she allowed to live among us. She was snatched out of the world as soon almost as she had made her appearance in it, like a jewel of high price just shown a little, and then put up again, and we were deprived of her by that time we had learnt to value her. But circles may be complete though small; the perfection of life doth not consist in the length of it.'
As a friend of literature and of men of letters, Atterbury claims the student's recognition, and the five volumes of his correspondence deserve to be consulted.
Anthony, third Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).
'I will tell you,' writes the poet Gray, 'how Lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue: first, he was a lord; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; fourthly, they will believe anything at all provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm.'
One hundred and thirty-five years have gone by since Gray wrote his estimate of Lord Shaftesbury, whose Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) passed through several editions in the last century. The first volume consists of: A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour and Advice to an Author; Vol. ii. contains An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit (1699), and The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), and Vol. iii. contains Miscellaneous Reflections and the Judgments of Hercules.
Shaftesbury was a Deist, and while professing to honour the Christian faith, which he terms 'our holy religion,' exercises his wit and casuistry and command of English to undermine it. Pope, who shows in the Essay on Man that he had read the Characteristics, said that to his knowledge 'the work had done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the works of infidelity,' a judgment which may seem extravagant, for Shaftesbury is too vague and rhetorical greatly to influence thoughtful readers, and too much of a 'virtuoso,' to use his own words, for readers of another class; yet the fact that the work passed, as we have said, through several editions, shows that the author had a considerable public to whom he could appeal. Moreover, it is clear that what Mr. Balfour calls 'the shallow optimism' of his creed was not deemed so inconsiderable then as it now appears, or Berkeley would not have deemed it necessary to controvert his arguments in the third Dialogue of his Alciphron. Like Berkeley, Shaftesbury occasionally makes use of the dialogue very effectively, but he has not the bishop's incisiveness. His style, though often faulty, and giving one the impression that the author is affected, and wishes to say fine things, is at its best fresh and lucid. The reader will observe that whatever be the topic Shaftesbury professes to discuss, his one aim is to assert his principles as a free-thinking and free-speaking philosopher. His inferences, his illustrations, his criticisms, and exaltation of the 'moral sense,' are all so many underhanded blows at the faith which he never openly opposes.
Thus his essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour is chiefly written in defence of raillery in the discussion of serious subjects, when managed 'with good breeding,' and for 'a liberty in decent language to question everything' amongst gentlemen and friends. He regards ridicule as the antidote to enthusiasm, believes in the harmony and perfection of nature, and considers that evil only exists in our ignorance. Mr. Leslie Stephen, whose impartiality in estimating an author like Shaftesbury will not be questioned, calls him a wearisome and perplexed writer, whose rhetoric is flimsy, but who has 'a true vigour and originality which redeems him from contempt.'
Judged by his influence on the age Shaftesbury's place in the history of literature and of philosophy is an important one. Seed springs up quickly when the soil is prepared for it, and Shaftesbury by his belief in the perfectibility of human nature through the aid of culture, appealed, as Mandeville also did from a lower and opposite platform, to the views current in polite society. According to Shaftesbury men have a natural instinct for virtue, and the sense of what is beautiful enables the virtuoso to reject what is evil and to cleave to what is good. Let a man once see that to be wicked is to be miserable, and virtue will be dear for its own sake apart from the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. He found salvation for the world in a cultivated taste, but had no gospel for the men whose tastes were not cultivated.