11 - The rude essay

Summary

In January 1734, three years after his return from America, Berkeley was consecrated Bishop of Cloyne. In the 1720s, Berkeley had devoted little time to his Deanery at Derry; the business of promoting the Bermuda project demanded his presence in London. At Cloyne, however, he proved himself an assiduous servant of the Church of Ireland. There he spent most of his twenty remaining years, visiting Dublin only once and not returning to England until shortly before his death. As Bishop he committed his energies to improving conditions in his impoverished see. He set up a spinning school in Cloyne, and introduced the cultivation of hemp and flax. When epidemics raged through Ireland in the early 1740s he tended the sick himself, discovering, in the process, the curative properties of tar-water. But despite these consuming pastoral duties and his isolation from lettered society, these were not years of literary stagnation for Berkeley. He continued to write extensively on Irish affairs, often on themes inspired by his own experiences in Cloyne. These late works show no diminishment of Berkeley's literary powers, nor even of the inventiveness of his earlier writings. The same impulse that had led him to explore that most demanding of philosophical genres, the dialogue, inspired several radical experiments in form and style in his last years.

The most striking of these formal experiments is unquestionably The Querist, containing several Queries, proposed to the Consideration of the Public. This work first appeared serially, in three parts, between 1735 and 1737, and consisted wholly of a list of 895 rhetorical questions. Many of Berkeley's writings had made extensive use of questions.