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Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Brian Cowan
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Extract

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to human virtue. And despite the third earl's widespread reputation as a freethinker in matters religious, he always insisted that liberty of thought did not imply a freedom from moral restraint.

Certainly Shaftesbury's early reputation was more that of a shy and unsociable recluse rather than that of a rakish mondain. In 1721, John Toland thought it necessary to defend his late friend from accusations of unsociability, not of licentiousness. He claimed that Shaftesbury's enemies “gave out that he was too bookish, because not given to play, nor assiduous at court; that he was no good companion, because not a rake nor a hard drinker, and that he was no man of the world, because not selfish nor open to bribes.” Toland also remarked how Shaftesbury frowned upon the “extravagant liberties” taken by “both sexes” even without having lived “to see masquerades, or the ancient Bacchanals revived, nor to hear of promiscuous clubs.” Indeed, Lord Ashley's own private papers reveal that he was quite uncomfortable in the polite world of England's social elite; he much preferred the pastoral tranquillity of his Dorset estate and the relaxed company of his most trusted friends.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 111 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1998

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References

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10 Aldridge, A. O., “Shaftesbury's Rosicrucian Ladies,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 103 (1985): 297–319Google Scholar. Shaftesbury excised many sexual references from the unauthorized 1699 publication of his Inquiry concerning Virtue when he edited it for inclusion as Treatise IV of the Characteristics. See Aldridge, , “Two Versions of Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue,” Huntington Library Quarterly 13 (1950): 207–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Trumbach, Randolph, “Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, Lynn (New York, 1993), pp. 270, 267Google Scholar; see also Trumbach, , “Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,” in Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson, ed. Kimmel, Michael S. (New York, 1990), pp. 105–24, esp. 113–14, 123, n. 14Google Scholar. Similar claims for the emergence of a refined libertinism around the turn of the century, but associated with neo-epicureanism rather than Shaftesbury, are also made in Novak, Max, William Congreve (New York, 1971), pp. 18–19, 41–51Google Scholar; and Weber, Harold, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison, Wis., 1986), pp. 91–97Google Scholar.

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14 Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 76, n. 17Google Scholar, “Liberty, Manners and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (1989): 583–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Champion, Pillars; Worden, A. B., “Introduction,” in A Voyce from the Watch Tower, Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. Worden, A. B., Camden Fourth Series, vol. 21 (London, 1978), pp. 1–84Google Scholar.

16 See the works cited in note 13 above.

17 The first earl of Shaftesbury's role in the formation of a whig identity has recently undergone significant revision; see Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), p. 100Google Scholar; Scott, Jonathan, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 13–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Knights, Mark, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681, (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 107, 131–34Google Scholar.

18 Pitkin, Hannah, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984)Google Scholar, remains the most detailed case study of the role of gender in republican political discourse. But see also Weil, Rachel, “Sexual Ideology and Political Propaganda in England, 1678–1714” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1991), esp. chap. 2Google Scholar.

19 Rand, , ed., The Life, pp. 301, 303–5, 321–22, 341, 408, 433Google Scholar; cf. Voitle, Robert, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), p. 284Google Scholar.

20 [Toland, ], ed., Letters, pp. xiii, 3, 10Google Scholar; cf. Rand, , The Life, pp. 391 ff.Google Scholar Shaftesbury's two attempts at courtship and marriage are discussed in Voitle, , The Third Earl, pp. 283–310Google Scholar. Trumbach uses Shaftesbury's reluctance to marry as evidence for his contention that the earl “fit into the pattern of the traditional bisexual libertine,” in “Sodomy Transformed,” p. 113; cf. Voitle, , The Third Earl, p. 242Google Scholar.

21 [Toland, ], ed., Letters, p. 41Google Scholar.

22 See, e.g., Voitle, , The Third Earl, p. 196Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 18–19, 196, n. 34.

24 See Shaftesbury's use of “enthusiasm” as an identifier of inclusion within an esoteric club including Lord Somers in Rand, , ed., The Life, pp. 386, 394, 420, 430Google Scholar. Shaftesbury sent copies of his works and shared his philosophy with Stanhope (Ibid., pp. 413–16), who was also made an executor of Shaftesbury's estate (Voitle, , The Third Earl, p. 248Google Scholar, n. 49). Shaftesbury remarks on his friendships with both Robert, and Molesworth, John in Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 520Google Scholar. Voitle discusses Shaftesbury's friendships with Somers, and Stanhope, in The Third Earl, pp. 67, 170, 196, 241–42, 260, 302–3, 307–8, 324, 407–8Google Scholar. Sachse, William L., Lord Somers: A Political Portrait (Manchester, 1975)Google Scholar, has little to say about Somers's relationship with Shaftesbury.

25 None of Stanhope's letters to Shaftesbury have survived; see Voitle, , The Third Earl, pp. 247–48, esp. n. 49Google Scholar.

26 Rand, , ed., The Life, pp. 181, 179Google Scholar; cf. pp. 68, 107, 247–48. Shaftesbury's concerns with the falseness of theatricality in social life are discussed in Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, pp. 72–80, 90–96Google Scholar. See also Marshall, David, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York, 1986), pp. 1–70Google Scholar; and Agnew, , Worlds Apart, pp. 162–69Google Scholar.

27 Shaftesbury, , Characteristics, 1:177–78Google Scholar; cf. 2:315, 1:178–179, 2:258.

28 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 112Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., p. 337; cf. pp. 416–17; Shaftesbury, , Characteristics, 2:11Google Scholar; and Barrell, R. A., ed., Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and “Le Refuge Français” Correspondence (Lewiston, N.Y., 1989), pp. 242–43Google Scholar. Shaftesbury's devaluation of Gothic virtue, against the discursive grain of his republican contemporaries, is discussed in Klein, , “Liberty, Manners and Politeness,” pp. 593–605Google Scholar.

30 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:53Google Scholar; Shaftesbury also refers to his coterie as a “club” in Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 440Google Scholar.

31 Although Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 37Google Scholar, notes the differences between Shaftesbury and Addison, the main thrust of his studies has been to emphasize “the important similarities” between Shaftesbury and the Spectator project; see esp. pp. 8–14, 36–41; and Klein, Lawrence, “Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists,” in Brewer, and Staves, , eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property, p. 221Google Scholar; but cf. Klein, , “Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere,” in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. Still, Judith and Worton, Michael (Manchester, 1993), p. 109Google Scholar, in which Shaftesbury's homosocial ideal is acknowledged.

32 Swift, Jonathan, “Essay on Conversation,” in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Davis, Herbertet al. (Oxford, 1957), 4:95Google Scholar; Addison, Joseph, in The Spectator, no. 57 (5 May 1711), ed. Smith, G. Gregory (London, 1907), 1:213Google Scholar; Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1985), p. 215Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:202Google Scholar. Compare Saint-Évremond, , Miscellany Essays (London, 1694), p. 164Google Scholar. See Potkay, Adam, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 74–84Google Scholar, on the importance of le commerce des femmes for early eighteenth-century English discourse on politeness.

33 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:67–68, n. 1Google Scholar.

34 [Toland, ], ed., Letters, pp. 12, 26, 34Google Scholar.

35 Public Record Office (PRO), Shaftesbury to a brother, 22 January 1704/5, PRO 30/24/20/110, fols. 274r–275v. The letter was first brought to attention by Shaftesbury's biographer, Voitle, , The Third Earl, pp. 242–45Google Scholar.

36 PRO 30/24/20/110, fol. 274r (all emphases in quotations from this letter are in the original MS); Voitle, , The Third Earl, p. 244Google Scholar, assumes that the boy's name was indeed “Bawble,” but A. O. Aldridge, in his review of Voitle, , Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985–1986): 258Google Scholar, suggests the more likely possibility that this was Shaftesbury's pseudonymic invention. It is just as likely that the letter was not intended for Shaftesbury's brother Maurice, but for one of his close friends, perhaps Thomas Micklethwayte or Sir John Cropley.

37 PRO 30/24/20/110, fols. 274v–275r. Shaftesbury's displeasure with “rake-hell” libertinism is not out of character but significant nevertheless in this context.

38 PRO 30/24/20/110, fol. 275r.

39 Voitle simply declares, “That Shaftesbury would cherish a letter that consciously revealed him as a homosexual is inconceivable,” in The Third Earl, p. 244, while Trumbach asserts the contrary in “Sodomy Transformed,” p. 115.

40 Bray, Alan, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; this article emends his own earlier distinction in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Boston, 1982), pp. 60–62Google Scholar. A similar situation obtained among the early modern French aristocracy, according to Dewald, Jonathan, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 117–20Google Scholar. The varieties of homosexuality and homosociality are usefully explored in Rousseau, G. S., “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century,” in Maccubbin, , ed., 'Tis Nature's Fault, pp. 132–69Google Scholar.

41 Vickers, Brian, ed., Francis Bacon (Oxford, 1996), p. 477Google Scholar. Bacon himself was later accused of sodomy: Bray, , “Male Friendship,” pp. 14–15Google Scholar. Frame, Donald M., ed., The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, Calif., 1958), p. 138Google Scholar.

42 Rand, , ed., The Life, pp. 163, 218Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:38–39Google Scholar.

43 Shaftesbury, An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699 ed.) in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of … the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Hemmerich, Gerd and Bends, Wolfram (Stuttgart, 1981), 2:2, 285Google Scholar (p. 175 in original). Compare Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:314Google Scholar, 2:348.

44 Shaftesbury's ailments hindered his marriage prospects, and were apparently so severe that Lady Wentworth's first impression of him was that “he looks as if he was very short lived.” Cartwright, J. J., ed., The Wentworth Papers, 1705–1739 (London, 1883), p. 60Google Scholar.

45 Shaftesbury, The Adept Ladys or the Angelick Sect: Being the Matters of Fact of Certain Adventures Spiritual, Philosophical, Political and Gallant, in Hemmerich, and Bends, , eds., Standard Edition, 1:2, 378–442Google Scholar. The letter is addressed “Dear Brother.” See also the account in Voitle, , The Third Earl, pp. 198–200Google Scholar.

46 Trumbach, , “Sodomy Transformed,” p. 113Google Scholar; cf. Trumbach, , “Erotic Fantasy,” p. 270Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, Adept Ladys, pp. 396, 404, 390, 410, 422, 386; Aldridge persuasively argues that the adepts were Rosicrucians and, less convincingly, that the text reflects his break with John Toland, in “Shaftesbury's Rosicrucian Ladies.”

47 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:179Google Scholar.

48 Shaftesbury, Adept Ladys, p. 420.

49 Toland, John, Pantheisticon (1721; reprint, London, 1751), p. 64Google Scholar. The importance of esoteric communication for Shaftesbury's unreliable friend and client John Toland is stressed in Daniel, Stephen H., John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Kingston and Montreal, 1984), pp. 176–85Google Scholar. Shaftesbury's vexed relationship with Toland is documented in Heinemann, F. H., “John Toland and the Age of Reason,” Archiv für Philosophie 4, no. 1 (September 1950): 35–66Google Scholar, and Worden, A. B., “Introduction,” pp. 42–55Google Scholar.

50 Marburg, Clara, Sir William Temple: A Seventeenth Century “Libertin” (New Haven, Conn., 1932)Google Scholar; The libertinism of Saint-Évremond, especially as expressed in his essays “Sur la morale d'épicure,” and “Sur les plaisirs,” in Oeuvres en prose, ed. Ternois, René, 4 vols. (Paris: Librairie M. Didier, 1962–1969), 3:425–438Google Scholar; 4:12–23, awaits detailed scrutiny, but see Hazard, Paul, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1961), pp. 120–26Google Scholar; Pintard, René, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (1943; reprint, Geneva, 1983), pp. 326–27Google Scholar; Spink, J. S., French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London, 1960), p. 143Google Scholar; Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment, 2 vols. (1966; reprint, New York, 1977), 1:308Google Scholar; Rigaud, N. J., George Etherege: Dramaturge de la restauration anglaise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), 1:30, 335Google Scholar; and Dewald, , Aristocratic Experience, pp. 133–34Google Scholar. On Saint-Évremond's contemporary libertine reputation, see the “epitaph” in British Library (BL), Additional MS 40060, fol. 30r.

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55 Shaftesbury's platonism is emphasized in Cassirer, Ernst, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. Pettegrove, James P. (Austin, 1953), pp. 157–202Google Scholar; Grean, Stanley, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens, Ohio, 1967), esp. pp. 32–36Google Scholar, and “Introduction,” in Shaftesbury, Characteristics, pp. xxii–xxiii; Bernstein, John A., Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant (Cranbury, N.J., 1980), pp. 21–60Google Scholar. Shaftesbury's stoicism is emphasized in Champion, Pillars, pp. 210–18; and Aldridge, , “Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto,” esp. 330–41Google Scholar.

56 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:3Google Scholar, 1:92, 2:12, 1:279, 2:36.

57 Shaftesbury, An Inquiry (1699) in Hemmerich, and Bends, , eds., Standard Edition, 2:2, 279 (p. 173 in original)Google Scholar. Compare Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:12, 16, 74Google Scholar; Rand, , ed., The Life, pp. 404–5Google Scholar; and Shaftesbury to Arent Furley, 5 December 1705 in Forster, T., ed., Original Letters of John Locke, Algernon Sidney and Lord Shaftesbury (1847; reprint, Bristol, 1990), p. 170Google Scholar. Galenic attitudes to sexuality are discussed in Foucault, Michel, The Care of the Self, trans. Hurley, Robert (1984; reprint, New York, 1986), pp. 105–44Google Scholar; Rouselle, Aline, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Pheasant, Felicia (1983; reprint, Oxford, 1988), esp. p. 19Google Scholar; Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), pp. 19–20Google Scholar; and Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 35–49, 103Google Scholar.

58 Burnet, Gilbert, Some Passages of the Life and Death of Rochester (1680) in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. Farley-Hills, David (London, 1972), p. 57Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, An Inquiry, (1699) in Hemmerich, and Bends, , eds., Standard Edition, 2:2, 281Google Scholar (pp. 174–75 in original).

59 Shaftesbury, An Inquiry (1699) in Hemmerich, and Bends, , eds., Standard Edition, 2:2, 283Google Scholar (p. 176 in original), 2:2, 285, (pp. 177–78 in original). Compare Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:250, 311Google Scholar.

60 Shaftesbury, An Inquiry (1699) in Hemmerich, and Bends, , eds., Standard Edition 2:2, 288–89Google Scholar (p. 180 in original); cf. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:200Google Scholar.

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62 Ibid., p. 163.

63 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:219–20; 2:95, 147–48, 203–7, 271Google Scholar.

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65 Berry, Christopher, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 45–86, esp. 58–59, 66–67, and 118–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar on Shaftesbury. Christian criticisms of luxury tended to focus on its association with lust, see Berry, , The Idea of Luxury, pp. 87–98Google Scholar; and Ames, William, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof, Divided into Five Bookes (London, 1641), bk. 5, chap. 39Google Scholar.

66 Klein, , “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness,” p. 605Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:92–93, 313Google Scholar; see also Shaftesbury's disparaging comparison between Dutch “frugality and public good” and English “luxury and corruption”: Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 368Google Scholar.

67 Saint-Évremond, , in Miscellany Essays, 2 vols. (London, 1694), 1:243Google Scholar. For Évremond's praise of the erudito luxu of Petronius, see Saint-Évremond, , Oeuvres, 4:18Google Scholar, and “The Life of Petronius Arbiter,” in The Works of Petronius Arbiter, in Prose and Verse, trans. Addison, Joseph (London, 1736), pp. 2–3Google Scholar. Compare Mandeville, Bernard, A Letter to Dion, Occasion'd by His Book Call'd Alciphron, ed. Viner, J. (1732; reprint, Los Angeles, 1953), p. 18Google Scholar.

68 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:215–18Google Scholar; see also Barrell, , ed., “Le refuge français,” pp. 75–77, 161Google Scholar, cf. 247–51. Praise for simplicity of thought is commonplace in eighteenth-century criticism. See Spectator, no. 70 (21 May 1711), in G. G. Smith, ed., 1:263–68; no. 74 (25 May 1711), 1:279–84; and Wood, T. E. B., The Word “Sublime” and Its Context, 1650–1760 (Paris, 1972), pp. 76–77, 86, 94Google Scholar.

69 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:293–94, 296, emphasis mineGoogle Scholar.

70 Pocock, , The Machiavellian Moment, p. 56Google Scholar.

71 The locus classicus for this sentiment is found in Cicero's De officiis, bk. 1.22–23. I am grateful to Markku Peltonen for reminding me of this.

72 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 414Google Scholar. See also Forster, , ed., Original Letters, p. 186Google Scholar.

73 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 258Google Scholar.

74 Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, esp. pp. 143–50Google Scholar, establishes this definitively.

75 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:169, 204Google Scholar; cf. Sidney, Algernon, Discourses concerning Government, ed. West, Thomas G. (1698; reprint, Indianapolis, 1990), pp. 164–66Google Scholar.

76 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 216Google Scholar.

77 Ibid., The Life, p. 51.

78 Temple, William, “Upon the Garden of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening, in the Year 1685,” in Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Monk, Samuel H. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963), pp. 1–36Google Scholar.

79 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 121Google Scholar; cf. Ibid., p. 247. Shaftesbury's hortulan philosophy did have an ethical component: Hunt, John Dixon, “Hortulan Affairs,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Greengrass, Mark, Leslie, Michael, and Raylor, Timothy (Cambridge, 1994), p. 339Google Scholar. On the third earl's own gardens, see Cartwright, , ed., Wentworth Papers, p. 59Google Scholar; and Leatherbarrow, David, “Character, Geometry and Perspective: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Principles of Garden Design,” Journal of Garden History 4, no. 4 (1984): 332–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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81 Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 108Google Scholar.

82 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:33, 36, 129Google Scholar.

83 Ibid., 2:274; cf. Ibid., p. 161.

84 Shaftesbury claims that he consciously rejected the “direct way of dialogue” in the piece because that is a base form fit only for the “burlesque divinity” of church controversy; Characteristics, 2:337Google Scholar.

85 Ibid., pp. 335, 27, 18, 95.

86 Novak, Max, “Margaret Pinchwife's ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 1–23Google Scholar.

87 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:3Google Scholar, emphasis mine; cf. Ibid., 1:92.

88 Virgil, , Eclogue 6, esp. lines 13–30Google Scholar; cf. Plato, , Symposium 215B–222CGoogle Scholar; the image also appears in Xenophon, Symposium 4.19. The representation of Bacchus in the figure of a Silenus was not unfamiliar to Shaftesbury's contemporaries, see BL, Sloane MS 3961, fol. 87r; and BL Add. MS 40060, fol. 1v.

89 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:96Google Scholar.

90 Ibid., pp.42, 32, 54, 110.

91 This topos is brilliantly explored in Turner, “The Libertine Sublime,” and “‘Illustrious Depravity.’”

92 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:107Google Scholar, emphasis mine.

93 Ibid., pp. 111, 114.

94 Ibid., pp. 119, 122. Shaftesbury's defense of the beauty of vastness may have been a response to Saint-Évremond's criticisms of the aesthetics of the vast in Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1692), pp. 302–32Google Scholar; original in Oeuvres en prose, 3:375–417Google Scholar.

95 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:125Google Scholar.

96 MarjorieNicolson, Hope, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York, 1959), pp. 299–300, 323Google Scholar.

97 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:125, 126, 131, 174Google Scholar.

98 On the rhapsodic genre, see Rogers, Pat, “Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody,” British Journal of Aesthetics 12, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 244·57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Shaftesbury's sublime, see Monk, Samuel H., The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (1935; reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), pp. 59–60, 208–10Google Scholar; Nicolson, , Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, pp. 289–300Google Scholar; Brett, R. L., The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London, 1951), pp. 145–64Google Scholar. Wood, The Word Sublime, demonstrates the difficulty of separating the rhetorical from other notions of the sublime, albeit without reference to Shaftesbury.

99 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:279Google Scholar.

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101 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:118, 178, 114, 124Google Scholar; 1:142, 157, 160, 165, 168–69. Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, pp. 203–6, 209Google Scholar, reads Shaftesbury as wholly antithetic to the aesthetics of the sublime by focusing only on these statements.

102 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:121–28, 142–43, 128Google Scholar.

103 Ibid., 1:92, 2:175.

104 Ibid., 1:16, 92. Augustan images of Venus are examined in Turner, James G., “The Sexual Politics of Landscape: Images of Venus in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry and Landscape Gardening,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982): 343–66Google Scholar.

105 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1:217Google Scholar; 2:345, 346.

106 On the esoteric nature of some forms of libertine sociability, see Pintard, , Le libertinage érudit, pp. 121–22Google Scholar; Darnton, Robert, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995), p. 107Google Scholar; Jacob, Margaret, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Shields, David S., “Anglo-American Clubs: Their Wit, Their Heterodoxy, Their Sedition,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51, no. 2 (April 1994): 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Trumbach, , “Erotic Fantasy,” pp. 271–82Google Scholar.

107 Turner, , “The Culture of Priapism,” p. 9Google Scholar; cf. Turner, , “‘Illustrious Depravity,’” pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

108 Trumbach, , “Erotic Fantasy,” pp. 271–82, esp. 281Google Scholar, conflates Shaftesbury's “program of the virtuoso” with the later libertinism of John Cleland and Francis Dashwood.

109 Klein, , Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 14Google Scholar.

110 Lawrence Klein recognizes that “the term ‘politeness’ had a wide range of uses,” in the early eighteenth century in his “Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists,” in Brewer, and Staves, , eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property, p. 228Google Scholar.

111 Shaftesbury did not approve of unnecessary visits to London by his family; Voitle, , The Third Earl, p. 82Google Scholar. David Marshall imaginatively explores the significance of the ways in which Shaftesbury “denies the public character of his published book,” in the Characteristics in The Figure of Theater, pp. 1–33, quote at p. 18.

112 Rand, , ed., The Life, p. 68Google Scholar; Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:4Google Scholar. See also Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 2:165, 327–330Google Scholar.