Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat: Shaftesbury, Horatian Satire, and the Cultural (Ab)uses of Laughter

Abstract

This essay argues that a full understanding of Shaftesbury’s notions of humour and laughter requires due consideration of the different rhetorical situations underlying both his published texts and unpublished manuscripts. Against the background of the Earl’s reading of Horatian satire and irony, it appears that the tensions that pervade Shaftesbury’s views about the several functions of humour and laughter are attributable to the difficulties of practically applying his theoretical assumptions. Envisioning an enlightened, Whig utopia, Shaftesbury’s theory had to stand the test of current political circumstances nevertheless – in a time dominated by party feuds consequent upon the War of the Spanish Succession, his ideal of a mild, constructive satirical laughter cultivated by a learned caste of philosopher-politicians at last turned out to be a largely ineffective weapon of political propaganda.

Full text

XVII-XVIII
70 (2013)
Autour du rire
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Patrick Müller
Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat:
Shaftesbury, Horatian Satire, and the
Cultural (Ab)uses of Laughter
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
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Patrick MÜLLER. “Ridentem Dicere Verum Quid Vetat: Shaftesbury, Horatian Satire, and
the Cultural (Ab)Uses of Laughter.” RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 70 (2013): 47-71.
RIDENTEM DICERE VERUM QUID VETAT:
SHAFTESBURY, HORATIAN SATIRE,
AND THE CULTURAL (AB)USES OF LAUGHTER
This essay argues that a full understanding of Shaftesbury’s notions of
humor and laughter requires due consideration of the different rhetorical
situations underlying both his published texts and unpublished manuscripts.
Against the background of the Earl’s reading of Horatian satire and irony, it
appears that the tensions that pervade Shaftesbury’s views about the several
functions of humor and laughter are attributable to the difficulties of
practically applying his theoretical assumptions. Envisioning an enlightened,
Whig utopia, Shaftesbury’s theory had to stand the test of current political
circumstances nevertheless – in a time dominated by party feuds consequent
upon the War of the Spanish Succession, his ideal of a mild, constructive
satirical laughter cultivated by a learned caste of philosopher-politicians at
last turned out to be a largely ineffective weapon of political propaganda.
Cet article s’attache à montrer que l’on ne peut véritablement comprendre
les notions d’humour et de rire chez Shaftesbury si l’on ne tient pas compte
des différentes situations rhétoriques présentes aussi bien dans les textes
publiés que dans les manuscrits inédits. La lecture de la satire et de l’ironie
horatiennes par le philosophe fait apparaitre que les tensions sous-jacentes
aux différentes fonctions qu’il attribue à l’humour et au rire peuvent être
mises sur le compte des difficultés rencontrées par l’application pratique de
ses présupposés théoriques. Postulant une utopie whig éclairée, la théorie de
Shaftesbury dut cependant se confronter aux circonstances politiques qui
prévalaient : dans une période dominée par les querelles entre partis suite à
la guerre de succession d’Espagne, son idéal d’un rire satirique modéré et
constructif cultivé par une caste éclairée d’hommes politiques philosophes
finit par devenir une arme de propagande politique largement inefficace.
verything that can be said about Shaftesbury’s theory of laughter
has, it might seem, already been said. Although the main focus of
scholarship to date has quite naturally been on the role of laughter as
an antidote to religious enthusiasm or fanaticism, the psychological,
E

PATRICK MÜLLER
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48
social, political, and literary dimensions of laughter as perceived by
Shaftesbury have also attracted their share of critical attention. Both
his published writings, assembled in 1711 to form Characteristicks,
and passages from the relevant private manuscripts, Pathologia and
Askêmata, have been included in such investigations. This broad
range of applications shows that the concept of “laughter” or “humor”
is no mere appendix to other, more important issues that dominate
Shaftesbury’s thought. It in fact occupies a prominent place within a
philosophy which attempts to unmask and reform, on multiple levels
– comprehensively even – the “characteristics of men, manners,
opinions, and times.” For this undertaking, laughter is one, perhaps
even the instrument of choice.
However, neither the different thematic strands nor the relationship
between the Earl’s published and unpublished writings have ever
been brought together for more systematic joint scrutiny, and this
although only a broader approach can do Shaftesbury justice.
Philosophy proper was, to his mind, an interaction between the
different disciplines,1 and he made no real distinction between the
rhetorical methods of philosophy and literature, a view which informs
most of the texts that were brought together in Characteristicks
(Müller, “The Able Designer”). In order to reveal the true scope of
Shaftesbury’s theory of laughter, and to provide an adequate
explanation for the obvious tensions that underlie its ultimate aim, we
must therefore first attempt to chart the different aspects of his notion.
Secondly, we need to be aware and mindful of the differing rhetorical
intentions within the body of Shaftesbury’s writings before we can
begin to comprehend what must otherwise remain a puzzling concept.
The Different Contexts
In his introduction to A History of English Laughter, Manfred
Pfister points out that “laughter takes part in, and is part of, social
history,” that it is indeed a “litmus test in assessing the state of a
given society” (vi-vii). Although Pfister makes a general point here,
his remarks could almost have been tailored specifically to encompass
the scope of Shaftesbury’s views about laughter. As a phenomenon
1. “Shaftesburys Schriften lassen sich nicht auf philosophische Disziplinen
verteilen. Ethik, Ästhetik, Erkenntnislehre, Politik sowie anthro-pologische und
religionsphilosophische Gedankengänge werden zusammen vorgetragen” (Uehlein 62).

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related, in some way or another, to the emotions, laughter, in the Earl’s
view, plays an important role in social life and so requires close
intellectual attention. His is, in point of fact, probably the most
detailed theory of laughter to have emerged from the long eighteenth
century, and it remained, for quite a while, the most controversial one
to boot.2
The terminological cluster huddled around the term “laughter” is,
of course, a complex one at the best of times. In Shaftesbury,
“ridicule,” “wit,” “raillery,” and “humor” are important (and multivalent)
co-referents. Michael Billig has, in a perhaps over-simplifying yet useful
way, summarized for us the basic meanings of wit and humor at the
time: “Wit involved playing with ideas or words, whereas humor
occurred when the object of the laughter was a person” (61-62). For
Shaftesbury, however, the term “humor,” with its obvious ety-
mological roots in humoral pathology has a more extensive meaning,
especially when part of the semantic pair “good humor.” It is a “good
disposition” or even “a virtue” for the Earl, and as such its function is
twofold: on the one hand “it contributes to governing the action of
ridicule,” and, on the other, it disciplines “the passion of laughter.”
Laughter, then, was numbered by Shaftesbury among the passions,
and it is important to note here that his was a “cognitivist conception
of the emotions,” one which holds that “emotions are beliefs, true or
erroneous” (Jaffro, “Reading Shaftesbury’s Pathologia” 12 & 6). In
keeping with the principal epistemological objective of his thought, to
“regulate FANCY, and rectify OPINION” (Miscellaneous Reflections
240 [198-99]),3 it was necessary to direct laughter towards its proper
objects, those, that is, which were deserving of it. In consequence, the
disciplining of one’s natural disposition to laughter constituted an
important aspect of every individual’s character training.
2. For a concise introduction to the controversy, which revolved principally
around the test of ridicule, see Gilmore.
3. All references to the Earl’s writings are to the Standard Edition. Arabic
numerals in square brackets refer to page numbers in the 1714/15 edition of the
Characteristicks. The treatises are: Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author and Letter
concerning Enthusiasm (I 1); Miscellaneous Reflections (I 2); Sensus Communis
(I 3); Notes to Characteristicks (I 4); Second Characters including Plasticks (I 5);
Select Sermons and Ainsworth Correspondence (II 4); Askêmata (II 6).

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50
The Therapeutic Context
It is in his Sensus Communis and Soliloquy that Shaftesbury
outlines the character traits one must develop in order that one be able
to recognize the proper uses of laughter. The section in his private
Askêmata on the “Passions,” however, reveals that the fundamentals of
his theory of a “strict inward Economy,” a regimen designed to guide
the individual towards a complete knowledge of the self, had been
formulated as early as 1698. There, we find him describing “Laughter”
as “a Passion” which may potentially “be employd sometimes against
[…] the Pomp & rediculouse solemnity of human affaires.” Yet he
cautions himself that one must be circumspect, for
there [is] nothing more unsafe, or more difficult of management.
this was well perhaps heretofore, & might suit with one who was yet
unfix’d, & only in a way towards improvement: but It must become
a very different kind, ‘ere it be suitable with one who understands
himself: and it is enough to say, that it is wholly un-manageable
whilst any of that impotent sort remains, or that any thing of this
kind is in the least degree involuntary in the Temper, & not
perfectly under command: and what Strength of Mind, Constancy,
& Firmness this implyes, is easy to understand. (245-46)
Laughter, then, is only a reliable divining rod in the detection of
“Pomp” and “solemnity” for those who are, in a Socratic and Stoic
sense,4 masters of their own selves. It is therefore important to define
the proper province of laughter: “There is a great difference between
seeking how to raise a Laugh from every thing; and seeking, in every
thing, what justly may be laugh’d at” (Sensus Communis 102 [128]).
As “nothing is ridiculous except what is deform’d” (Sensus
Communis 102 [128]), only those able to recognize what is genuinely
deformed are in a position to identify the proper objects of laughter.
The “humor” which allows an individual to laugh at the right things is
accordingly difficult to cultivate. In fact, only the purebred philosopher,
4. According to Shaftesbury’s understanding of the history of Philosophy, there
were no “more than two real distinct Philosophys” in antiquity: “one deriv’d from
Socrates & passing into the old Academick, ye Peripatetick & Stoick” (for him “the
Socratick, Civil, or Social”) and “the other deriv’d […] from Democritus and passing
into the Cyrenaick and Epicurean,” which he calls “meer Sceptick and new Academick”
and dismisses as “an Exercize or Sophistry, rather than a Philosophy” (Shaftesbury to
Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706 (The National Archives: PRO 30/24/45/80 Part 3, fol. 419r).
The editors of the Standard Edition are currently preparing an edition of the Earl’s
complete correspondence: I cite the manuscript texts as they will be shown there.

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or virtuoso, can achieve this state of mind. The yardsticks for humor,
wit, ridicule, and laughter are beauty, goodness, and truth, concepts
which Shaftesbury basically considered identical.5 As an emotion or
passion, laughter needs to be made conformable to these yardsticks.
Shaftesbury’s theory of decent laughter is thus designed for a cultured
caste of “well bred People, those of a finer Make, better Tast & raisd
above the Vulgar” (Askêmata 445).6 His urge to define, indeed confine,
the number of those qualified to laugh appropriately suggests that he
by no means rejected the views of those who regarded laughter as a
corrosive social and political force.7 Quite the contrary: his vision of
a cultural elite, of a select breed of “Lovers of Beauty” all party to the
art of having (or raising) an acceptable laugh, points to his general
distrust of “vulgar” laughter and its ramifications.
The Religious Context
“It was heretofore the Wisdom of some wise Nations, to let People
be Fools as much as they pleas’d, and never to punish seriously what
deserv’d only to be laugh’d at” (Letter concerning Enthusiasm 322 [13-
14]). This is a key phrase which summarizes neatly the idea behind one
of the most hotly debated concepts of the eighteenth century: the
famed test of ridicule. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus
Communis present the laughter provoked by ridicule as an “innocent
Remedy” that can be applied to all sorts of things regarded by
Shaftesbury as cultural evils. These could range from harmless
aesthetic faux pas to violent distempers such as those he perceived
among the Tory zealots who practiced religious persecution. His test
of ridicule demands the readiness to screen and, if deserved, laugh
both at the preconceptions of others and at one’s own: to examine
and, if need be, expose, in other words, those “Idol-Notions, which we
will never suffer to be unveil’d, or seen in open light” (Sensus Communis
16-18 [60]).
Laughter as a weapon in the arsenal of those fighting for
toleration is the most thoroughly investigated of the contexts briefly
5. In The Moralists, Theocles leads Philocles to declare that “BEAUTY […] and
GOOD” are “one and the same” (324 [399]), whereas in Sensus Communis we learn
that “all Beauty is TRUTH” (120 [142]).
6. See Weinsheimer 185-86. For Shaftesbury’s projected audience, see also Rivers
104-07.
7. According to Redwood, the dominant conception of laughter at the time (183).

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52
mentioned here. Laurent Jaffro has shown how Shaftesbury turns “la
disposition religieuse de Whichcote et de Tillotson en un tribunal
pour une critique de la religion” (“Humour et libre pensée” 46). As early
as in the anti-Hobbist preface to his edition of Benjamin Whichcote’s
sermons (1698), Shaftesbury draws on the Cambridge Platonist’s use
of the term “good nature” which, for both Whichcote and the Earl,
stands for a religious temper that emphasizes the altruistic potential of
man rather than his morose or selfish (and hence anti-social) traits.
“The first thing in Religion,” says Whichcote, “is, to refine a Man’s
Temper: And the second, to govern his Practice” (Select Sermons 290).
Properly understood, “Religion produceth a sweet and gracious Temper
of Mind; calm in its self, and loving to Men. It causeth a Universal
Benevolence and Kindness to Mankind.” Having listed the several
virtues included in his notion of “GOOD-NATURE,” Whichcote
concludes that religion proper “causeth the greatest Serenity and
Chearfulness to the Mind; and prevents groundless Fears, foolish
Imaginations, needless Suspicions, and dastardly Thoughts” (Select
Sermons 294).
In Characteristicks, the good-natured person or Christian is
ultimately, to use the terminology of humoral pathology employed by
Shaftesbury, one whose religious sensibility is not forged by a
“devout Melancholy or Enthusiasm,” but rather by a spirit of joy in
the face of divine benignity: “BUT, my Lord [Somers],” A Letter
concerning Enthusiasm informs us,
you may perhaps wonder, that having been drawn into such a
serious Subject as Religion, I shou’d forget my self so far as to give
way to Raillery and Humour. I must own, my Lord, ‘tis not merely
thro’ Chance that this has happen’d. To say truth, I hardly care so
much as to think on this Subject, much less to write on it, without
endeavouring to put my self in as good Humour as is possible. (332
[21-22])8
8. See Shaftesbury’s letter to Michael Ainsworth, 29 January 1709: “for never
do we more need a just Cheerfulness Good Humour & Alacrity of Mind than when
we are Contemplating God & Vertue” (Ainsworth Correspondence 379). Mikhail
Bakhtin has pointed out that carnivalesque or “festive laughter” aims at “the highest
spheres,” being rooted in the “most ancient rituals of mocking at the deity” (12).
Shaftesbury clearly had something very different in mind: the Deity is for him not the
object of mockery, but, as the embodiment of all that he thought of as good and true,
a cause of all joy and mirth.

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This was Shaftesbury’s panacea against religious fanaticism, the
worst expression of which he found in High-Church arguments against
religious toleration: these he identified as a threat to the liberalism he
considered to be the distinguishing feature of Protestantism. The
Tories and their High-Church allies were thus steering a dangerous
course on the fringes of Roman Catholicism – the persecution of the
French Prophets in their absolutist homeland provided the perfect
background for this analogy as it is drawn in the Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm.9
The Soci(ologic)al Context
Shaftesbury’s stance was that of the Whig, Low Church propa-
gandist, a fact which did not escape one of his earliest Tory critics.
Mary Astell urges her readers to “Detect […] the Blasphemy” of the
Letter concerning Enthusiasm’s invitation to contemplate God in the
spirit of good humor (28). The High-Church feminist’s principal strategy
in refuting the Letter’s theses is to chastise, with acid sarcasm, the
author of devices such as the test of ridicule for the “Outrageous
Profaneness” of the “Bart’lemy Fair Method” he applies to the Christian
religion.10 Shaftesbury appears as a man who “shoots his Arrows against
Heaven” only to see them “return upon his own Head” (47, 65).
Astell’s own arrows were shot in order to carry the by then familiar
message accusing a Whig author of libertine irreligion and anti-social
snobbishness. In doing so, she unwittingly armed Shaftesbury with
new ammunition for the arguments brought forth in Sensus Communis
and its attack on the Tories as
Gentlemen [...] so full of the Spirit of Bigotry, and false Zeal, that
when they hear Principles examin’d [...] with this frankness of
Humour, they imagine presently that all Professions must fall to the
ground, all Establishments come to ruin, and nothing orderly or
decent be left standing in the world. (36 [74-75])
At this point, Shaftesbury once again introduces a restriction of
the kind we have already seen where laughter is defined as the
privilege of an elite wise enough to put it to its proper social use. For
him, the worst thing one can do is “to laugh at publick Virtue, and the
very Notion of common Good” (Miscellaneous Reflections 214 [174]).
9. For the historical background, see Schwartz.
10. For a discussion in the context of religious toleration, see Alvarez.

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When he defends the freedom of humor, what he means is first and
foremost “the Liberty of the Club, and that sort of Freedom which is
taken amongst Gentlemen and Friends, who know one another
perfectly well.”11 It was important that the general “Publick” be not
“laugh’d at, to its face.” Dealing with “the Vulgar,” any politician was
well advised to treat all matters solemnly, but in “select Companys”
Shaftesbury saw “no pretence for any one to be offended at the way
of Raillery and Humour, which is the very Life of such Conversations”
(Sensus Communis 36-38 [75-76]). Such handpicked gatherings were,
then, for him the proper forum in which ultimately to determine (by
way of good-humored dialogue) and, ultimately, control the public good.
The Literary Context
This brings us to the rhetorical strategies underlying Charac-
teristicks, and what is of particular relevance here is the Earl’s theory
of satire. As a genre designed to expose aberrations from truth, or what
he calls “deformity,” its connection to his intended reform of laughter
is obvious. The consummate Shaftesburian satirist is the well-bred
gentleman-virtuoso who participates in the shaping of public welfare.
George Austin Test has pointed out that
to think that the laughter of satire is transforming or cathartic and
that it will produce those effects in all individuals fails to recognize
the complexity of what causes laughter. Laughter after all is both
personal and social. Society may define and determine what may or
may not be laughed at, but no individual will laugh at all the things
that society allows that individual to laugh at, nor will that person
necessarily refrain from laughing at what is socially unacceptable.
In fact, laughter is determined not only by society but is more
narrowly defined by social class […] educational background […]
and by community or geographical region. (25)
Within his particular parameters, Shaftesbury’s theory of satire seeks
to find a remedy for such differences (and that means recognizing
them in the first place). It attempts nothing less than to establish a
common basis for the laughter of those responsible for their country’s
chosen standards and ideals.
Miscellaneous Reflections, an almost postmodern jeu d’esprit
with an edge (written in 1710/11), helps us understand the Earl’s
11. For the significance of clubs in Shaftesbury, see Schmidt-Haberkamp (132-33).

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conception of the satiric mode. As he wrote to Lord Somers, “your
Ldp will find that if my Good-Humour be quite spent, I have Courage
however left to attack & provoke a most malignant party.” The High
Churchmen are now taken to task “not as Corrupters merely of
Morals & publick Principles; but as the very Reverse or Antipodes to
Good Breeding Scholarship, Behaviour, Sense & Manners.”12
The juxtaposition between the kind of satire produced by the
High Churchmen (who stand for a Tory, absolutist regime) on the one
side, and on the other by the moderate, Latitudinarian champions of
toleration (in Shaftesbury’s eyes the Whig champions of liberty)
determines the emblematic language of the engraving designed by the
Earl for Miscellaneous Reflections (Fig. 1): the High-Church side
displays all the paraphernalia of oppression and entrapment, whereas
the satyr on the right-hand side is capable of testing the established
doctrine of his own church, and is therefore able to laugh at his own
whims.13
Fig. 1: Engraving for Miscellaneous Reflections, Vol.3
Illustration accompanying “Miscellaneous Reflections,” p.314
12. Shaftesbury to Lord Somers, 30 March 1711 (The National Archives: PRO
30/24/22/4, fols 355-6).
13. For my interpretation of the engraving and the unauthorized changes in the
right-hand panel (by either Shaftesbury’s literary executor Thomas Micklethwaite or
the engraver Simon Gribelin), see “Mapping a Tory’s ‘Prostitute Pen and Tongue.’”
14. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1
565&Itemid=263>. 9 December 2013.

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56
In Soliloquy, Shaftesbury had already warned authors against sharp
satiric outbursts in public, discharges untempered by “the wholesom
Regimen of Self-Practice” (56 [167]) he personally submitted himself to
in his Askêmata. He argues that British satire knows no restraint, the
country’s satirists being “Slaughter-men” (186 [270]) whose “scurrilous,
buffooning” satirical mode is “without Morals or Instruction; which is
the Majesty and Life of this kind of writing” (180 [266]). Their ill-
humored, “splenetick” attacks betray a mind “thrown out of Good
Humour” (Miscellaneous Reflections 138 [109]). By applying the
language of humoral pathology to his theory of satire, Shaftesbury
seeks to find a remedy for what he regarded as a vicious circle, that
is, the mutual fertilization of religious fanaticism and the spirit of
persecution that leads to ever new heights of ill will. The inspection
of one’s own religious views in the spirit of good (or spleen-free)
humor is a possibility open to someone who has whetted his or her
intellectual skills in polite conversation and thus arrived at proper,
fixed conclusions regarding the need for a liberal constitution and for
toleration of other beliefs. Shaftesbury saw the fatal exchange between
ill-directed enthusiasm and persecution as potentially destructive rather
than constructive, and so as a very real threat to liberty and sociability
– as a pernicious force that had to be exorcised.
The obvious literary tool for this exorcism was satire, its principal
weapons being raillery and ridicule.15 Satire proper could only flourish
among “real Gentlemen,” those, that is, who were willing to have
their own views examined and put to the test. Such an illustrious
audience makes the task of the satirist an all the more delicate and
difficult one: the application of the weapons “Wit and Humour” must
needs be highly refined and customized. Shaftesbury mockingly advises
the Tory humorists to polish their style lest the subjects of their satire
Discover not the least Feature of their real Faces in your Looking-
glass, nor know themselves, in the least by your Description; they
will hardly be apt to think they are refuted. How wittily soever your
Comedy may be wrought up, they will scarce apprehend any of that
Wit to fall upon themselves. They may laugh indeed at the Diversion
you are pleas’d to give ‘em: But the Laugh perhaps may be different
from what you intend. They may smile secretly to see themselves
thus encounter’d; when they find, at last, your Authority laid by, and
15. Shaftesbury’s terminological imprecision is examined briefly in Schmidt-
Haberkamp 126-27.

SHAFTESBURY AND CULTURAL (AB)USES OF LAUGHTER
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57
your scholastick Weapons quitted, in favour of this weak Attempt,
To master them by their own Arms, and proper Ability.
(Miscellaneous Reflections 346 [295-96])
To laugh people out of their (religious) follies is, then, an arduous
task, requiring substantial intellectual and rhetorical skills of the very
kind exemplified by Shaftesbury’s own polite style. It seems that, for
once, the Earl agrees with Hobbes. Reflecting on the sources of laughter
in Askêmata, Shaftesbury identifies Schadenfreude or the “malicious
delight at another’s misfortune” (445)16 to be at bottom, a view which
corresponds (roughly at least) with that of Hobbes. Although the
latter clearly advocates a “superiority theory” of laughter according to
which it is the facial expression caused by a feeling of “Sudden
glory,” the overarching purpose of Leviathan – to produce stability
and peace – leads him to advise the future King Charles II that he
ought to purge himself of this feeble expression of emotion, “one of
the proper works” of “great minds” being “to help and free others from
scorn; and compare themselves only with the most able” (Hobbes 38,
I.vi.42).17 Shaftesbury, then, is putting Hobbes’s admonition to
practical use in Characteristicks.
Satire and Politics in the Unpublished Writings: Pathologia, the
Horace-letters, and Askêmata
The conversational tone of the Earl’s published writings masks, at
least to a certain extent, the unease about the (ab)uses of laughter that
is more evident in some of his private manuscripts. Throughout his
writing career, Shaftesbury was very much interested in the cultural
uses of laughter; in fact, his policy of ridicule amounts to nothing less
than a detailed cultural critique. In his Pathologia, a manuscript text
recently edited for the first time in print, we find a typology of the
passions as found in Socratic-Stoic thought, and within that a
distinction which is of remarkable significance for the Earl’s theory
of satire. He differentiates there between two kinds of laughter:
jocositas or “mockery” and hilaritas or “mirth.” Jocositas is defined
as “immoderate, uncontrollable, loud laughter,” as “pleasure about
16. See Askêmata 445 and note 2.
17. For the superiority theory see Billig 50-56. In this broader context of the
taxonomy of humor, Shaftesbury’s theory has been classified as belonging to
“incongruity theories” which stress that laughter is a “real action […] within the
cognitive processes of the mind that is combining disparate ideas” (Billig 74).

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some ugliness in external things and other people, as if it was a good
for us” (Jaffro, “Pathologia” 10). In the light of the Earl’s views on the
relationship between beauty, truth, and goodness (or virtue), it is clear
that he regards jocositas as ill-directed laughter which exaggerates its
object’s importance for our lives – it is laughter motivated by mere
“malice or malignity.” Hilaritas, by contrast, is “moderate and
controllable laughter” defined as “a species of admiration.” Applied to
external objects, it is “a kind of overwhelming pleasure in view of or
upon the examination of an external thing fancied beautiful.” When
applied to oneself, however, “either by acquisition or as inherent to
us, it becomes immediately a boasting pleasure, i.e. a form of pride”
(Jaffro, “Pathologia” 10).
It is important to note here that the distinction is made within the
context of Horatian satire:18 it follows Shaftesbury’s reflections on
the (ironic) style of Horace, and the various paradoxes that suffuse
not only his favourite poet’s writings, but also the Stoic theory of the
passions. Pondering the question as to how Horace came to call
himself virtutis verae custos rigidisque satelles, the Earl concludes
that the answer is to be found in the different forms of satirical
laughter (Epistles I.i.17). While jocositas is generally condemned as
“immoderate,” hilaritas is definitely to be rejected if it leads to self-
infatuation. As admiration (admiratio) of external objects, however,
“mirth” is not dismissed out of hand, although it is generally “the
greatest cause of all vices, and that which increases and strengthens
them” (Jaffro, “Pathologia” 5). A passage from Askêmata shows that
Shaftesbury regarded admiration as the yardstick for establishing the
divine attributes, at least for the true philosopher:
Divest ye Deity of all wch we esteem Happiness & Good […] wch
way can we admire or respect such a Being but so much as in
comparison with some great Prince or dignifyed Man? Now, where
is the Remedy? What Cure? – Nothing but this. To consider what is
Excellent & Good; what Not. for, where we imagine this to be,
thither our Admiration will be turn’d; where we think this is
18. It can in fact be applied to the (traditional) one between the satires of Juvenal
and Horace as sketched in the Earl’s Plasticks, another unfinished manuscript. Here,
Shaftesbury postulates that the “more conceal’d & not the obviouse staring
notoriouse Faults in Manners” are the proper targets of satiric wit. This requires a
“finer & more delicate Imitation,” that is, Horace’s “nicest slightest Touches.” By
contrast, Juvenal’s coarser satire is based on “Exageration Amplification straining
highting over-charging” (181).

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wanting, thither our Contempt […] In Short: if we would truly own
or worship Deity; if we would leave room for any true & sincere
Veneration, Honour, Admiration or Esteem; we must either ascribe
those things to Him wch we admire as excellent & Good: or we must
no longer admire as Excellent or Good, those things wch we cannot
ascribe to Him. (107-08)
As the embodiment of all that is good and true and beautiful, Deity is
the proper object of enthusiastic admiration, a rapture which finds
expression in Theocles’ imaginary journeys in The Moralists. This
kind of mirth is an appropriate one, elicited as it is by those objects
which alone deserve our admiration: in moral terms virtue, in social
terms the public good, in aesthetic terms beauty, and in episte-
mological terms truth. It is here that we find the source of what has
been called “Shaftesbury’s attempt at satiric reform,” an endeavour
which “sought to refine and redirect – rather than wholly to subvert –
the destructive impulses of the genre” (Wolf 585). For the aggressive
intentions behind satire, admiratio seems to be too mild an impulse; it
therefore needs to be redirected in two steps. Firstly, the philoso-
phical regimen, the Stoic exercises performed by Shaftesbury in
Askêmata, must ensure that we do not admire the wrong objects. This
is part of the process of regulating “FANCY” and rectifying “OPINION”
which then, in a second step, leads to the apprehension of those objects
embodied by Deity. For Shaftesbury, the philosopher-satirist is an
admirer of everything that is proper and becoming in (human) nature,
and the good-humored disposition exemplified by this admiration is
the ideal to which he aspires.
As the motto for the Letter concerning Enthusiasm – ridentem
dicere verum quid vetat – betrays, Horace is certainly the single most
important classical author for any understanding of the Earl’s theory
of laughter and satire (Satires I.i.24-25). The Earl’s reading of Horace
illustrates for us his perception of the right kind of satirical writing. In
autumn 1706, Shaftesbury wrote two letters to his friend Pierre Coste
in which Horace’s life and writings are dissected. Horace possessed,
the Earl notes, the critical spirit necessary for self-inspection, for “Never
was a man more honestly bold with himself, more plain, frank,
ingenuous, beyond imagination in laying himself open.”19 He would
“say of himself all the sharp, severe, bitter things, which the greatest
19. For the significance of “criticism” in Shaftesbury’s theory of satire, see
Schmidt-Haberkamp 126, 129.

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Enemy coud say against him” and therefore provides the perfect
example of an individual applying the test of ridicule to his own
principles.20 Horace was properly qualified to be a satirist insofar as
he did not shy away from becoming the object of auto-aggressive
scorn: only those who can bear to inspect their own views may
become true satirists.
Shaftesbury detects three “principal States and Periods” in the
poet’s life: the first Horace’s “original Free Republican State,” also
termed the “Socratick, Civil, or Social,” the second the poet’s
“Debauchd, slavish, courtly State,” and the third his “Returning,
Recovering State, and his Recourse to his first Philosophy and
Principles.”21 Grappling with André Dacier’s reading of Epistle I.xxiv,
Shaftesbury praises “Horace’s Irony” for its “so just a measure,” its
simplicity and honesty”: “There is a due Proportion in Irony well
known to all polite Writers especially Horace who so well coppy’d
that noted Socratick kind.” While Dacier read the epistle as “une
raillerie continuelle contre les Stoïciens” (1.377-78)22 Shaftesbury
favours an interpretation which sees none of the “infamouse sort of
strain’d Irony” in the epistle, no
scurrilouse Mockery or Buffoonery against the Socratick Philosophy;
against vertue, against Religion or the establish’d Religious Rites of
his Country: but that it was actually a Truth, and a sincere one in his
mouth, that he had been to his sorrow Parcus Deorum Cultor et
infrequens, by having falln from his first Principles, with wch he
began the World: but that in process of Time after having
experiencd all yt Pleasures & a Court with looser Morals & a more
flattering Philosophy coud afford him, he did at last – retrorsum
Vela dare, atque iterare Cursus relictos.23
Horace’s frankness reflects “a simplicity […] little suitable to this Age,
and therefore little intelligible in it.”24 In this way, Horace is turned
into the impersonation of all that Shaftesbury would himself later
20. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 15 November 1706 (The National Archives:
PRO 30/24/45/80 Part 3, fols 430r-v).
21. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706 (Part 3, fols 418v-419v).
22. This edition was in the Earl’s library; see http://www.dozenten.anglistik.
phil.uni-erlangen.de/ shaftesbury/rr_greeklatin.html. 9 December 2013.
23. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706 (Part 3, fol. 423r); the quotations
are from Odes I.xxxiv.1 (“A niggardly and irregular worshipper”) and I.xxxiv.3-5
(“to sail back and again go over / The course I’d left behind”).
24. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 15 November 1706 (Part 3, fol. 431r).

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attempt to achieve with Characteristicks, and he even went so far as
to claim Horace for his own party, calling him an “Old Whigg.”25
Shaftesbury sees in Horace the perfect opposite to current British
satire. Like “the early Poets of GREECE” praised in Soliloquy, the Roman
poet “form’d [his] Audience; polish’d the Age; refin’d the publick Ear,
and framed it right; that in return [he] might be rightly applauded.”
British authors, by contrast, are chastised for being “turn’d and model’d
(as they themselves confess) by the publick Relish, and current Humour
of the Times […] In our Days the Audience makes the Poet” (178-80
[263-64]). Unrefined by profound thought, self-discourse, and polite
conversation, British satire only too easily degenerates into an instrument
of jocositas or of hilaritas.26 The political context is important here:
Shaftesbury associated different forms of satire with different
political (and therefore also religious) views and systems: the “Old
Whigg” Horace was for him the poet who still embodied the virtues
of the Roman Republic at the threshold to the Roman Empire. Horace’s
satire, as the model of refined writing, is the ideal recommended by
Shaftesbury. Contemporary British satire is vulgar in nature and as
such reflects the oppressive, ill-directed, and vicious laughter which
the Earl associated with the worst of the Roman emperors. The
distinction between the two types was used by him as a foil for early
eighteenth-century Britain:27 the (Low-Church) Whigs stood for the
educated, enlightened liberalism of the Roman Republic, the (High-
Church) Tories for a kingdom of darkness and absolutism.
In the philosophical exercises based on what the Earl regarded as
the “Socratic Stoicism” of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, he devised
an anatomy or short cultural history of laughter. In the section
“Nomoi,” written during his second period of retreat in Holland
(1703/4), he included a chapter on “Laughter” in which he distinguishes
between its two manifestations in history: the one based on malice,
such as the laughter of those who visit Bedlam to see and enjoy the
entertainments there (445, 447), and the other the “Divine Facetious-
ness” (449) represented by Socrates with his irony and fitting for
“Decorum” and the “ΤΟ ΚΑΛΟΝ” (445). Shaftesbury draws in each
25. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706 (Part 3, fol. 422r).
26. The latter in the sense of an excessive “pride” in the merits of British culture
as opposed to those of the ancients (see Soliloquy 180-86 [264-71]).
27. According to Abigail Williams, England’s “political and cultural history was
analogous to the history of Rome” for Shaftesbury (228).

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case a direct line between these kinds of laughter and the political
systems they represent. The first stands for “Savageness. Barbarity.
Immanity. […] Brutality. Tyranny,” the examples he cites being
Caligula (as portrayed by Suetonius) and Domitian (445-46), two of
the Roman emperors whose principles he believed perverted the
achievements of the Roman republic. This kind of laughter is a
disruptive force, whereas nothing “can be sweeter, gentler, milder,
more sociable, or more humane” than Socratic irony (424).
The distinction which informs this dichotomy is once again the
difference between the destructive and constructive forces of laughter. In
its excessive form, the passion acquires propagandistic strength; it
enables those who define the conventional sources of laughter to
ostracize those at whose expense a laugh is raised. Such laughter (in
the sense of jocositas) is idiosyncratic and, what is worse, socially
coercive. In contrast to this, Socratic irony, in the words of the first of
the Horace letters to Pierre Coste, is the mark of a “civil, social,
Theistick” constitution, one based on the belief “that Society, Right
and Wrong was founded in Nature, and that Nature had a meaning,
and was her self, that is to say, in her Witts, well governed and
administerd by one simple and perfect Intelligence.”28 Such controlled,
reasonable laughter therefore reflects the true republican spirit and its
penchant for tolerance and sociability.
“The first Roman Miscellanys, or Satyrick Pieces”: Rhetoric and
Shaftesbury’s Satire
There are certainly inconsistencies in the Earl’s arguments about
laughter, and these have in the past been subjected to detailed critical
examination, in particular where his concept of satire might be seen
to oppose what he says about ridicule. With regard to satire, Richard
B. Wolf sees a discrepancy between the private writings with their
cautions and Characteristicks with their occasional aggressiveness.
He attributes it to the Earl’s stoicism, that is, his attempt to bring the
passions under the control of reason. Especially in Miscellaneous
Reflections, Wolf argues, Shaftesbury partially abandoned “one of the
most interesting satiric experiments of the early eighteenth century”
in favor of a “more direct and less moderate approach to satiric targets
ranging from religious priesthoods in general to Tory High Churchmen
28. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 1 October 1706 (Part 3, fol. 419r).

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in particular” (582). The problem with this contention is that Wolf
does not give due thought to the different rhetorical modes employed
throughout the private writings and in Characteristicks.29
In Pathologia (conceived as a systematic exposition of the
Socratic-Stoic theory of the passions), the private letters, and
Askêmata (exercises of the kind Shaftesbury found it “very indecent
for any one to publish” Soliloquy 54 [164]), the emphasis is either on
the systematic exposition of his reading of Stoic texts or on the
therapeutic value of a Stoic regimen. The reflections on the social
(ab)uses of laughter in these writings provide the historical, sometimes
even the theoretical framework requisite for our understanding of
their author’s true thoughts on the nature of laughter and its implications
for social interaction. In his Characteristicks, however, he had to put
his own theory to (convincing) literary and philosophical use in order
to be able to persuade his readers – the difference is one between
private examination and public application. A full grasp of his notions
about laughter and humor is, then, contingent on the proper distinction
between, on the one hand, his philosophical ideals, his religious and
political convictions, and on the other the way in which the different
rhetorical requirements of his writings respectively shaped the
expression of his views.30
If we follow John Hayman, Shaftesbury’s persona in Miscellaneous
Reflections serves as an example ex negativo, the Miscellany writer
“embodying the ‘faulty’ [mode of writing]” and thus being exposed
“to satirical effect” (Hayman 499). A quotation from Soliloquy, which
identifies the miscellaneous as the proper satiric mode, corroborates
this view:
29. I find Jaffro’s and Maurer’s comparison between Pathologia on the one hand
and the Letter and Sensus Communis on the other problematic for the same reasons.
Their assertion that “Shaftesbury […] changed his mind in the space of a few months
on whether, firstly, laughter is or is not a passion (or the facial expression of a
passion) and whether, secondly, laughter may be used as a philosophical tool against
religious ‘enthusiasm’” (“Reading Shaftesbury’s Pathologia” 11-12) ignores the
different rhetorical circumstances. Moreover, it is important not to underestimate (as
they do) the context of Horatian satire.
30. See Sensus Communis 110 [134]: “Let the solemn Reprovers of Vice proceed
in the manner most sutable to their Genius and Character […] I know not, in the
mean while, why others may not be allow’d to ridicule Folly, and recommend
Wisdom and Virtue (if possibly they can) in a way of Pleasantry and Mirth. I know
not why Poets, or such as write chiefly for the Entertainment of themselves and
others, may not be allow’d this Privilege.”

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The only Manner left, in which Criticism can have its just Force
amongst us, is the antient COMICK; of which kind were the first
Roman Miscellanys, or Satyrick Pieces: a sort of original Writing of
their own, refin’d afterwards by the best Genius, and politest Poet of
that Nation [Horace]; who, notwithstanding, owns the Manner to
have been taken from the Greek Comedy above-mention’d. And if
our Home-Wits wou’d refine upon this Pattern, they might perhaps
meet with considerable Success. (172 [258-59])
Shaftesbury admired Horace above all for his candidness, for his
willingness to “lay himself open,” and for a “simplicity […] little
suitable to this Age, and therefore little intelligible in it.” And one
significant part of Earl’s personal programme is to relocate to his own
age the manner practiced by the Roman poet in his “Satyrick Pieces.”
“Almost every Creature wore a Mask”: The Ethiopian in Europe,
Bakhtinian Carnival, and the Satirical Persona
This explains why the example of the Ethiopian in Sensus
Communis is of such importance for the overall structure of
Characteristicks. Shaftesbury transports “a Native of ETHIOPIA” to
“PARIS or VENICE at a time of Carnival,” that is, “when the general
Face of Mankind was disguis’d, and almost every Creature wore a
Mask.” Shaftesbury imagines that the Ethiopian would be perplexed
until
he discover’d the Cheat: not imagining that a whole People cou’d be
so fantastical, as upon Agreement, at an appointed time, to
transform themselves by a Variety of Habits, and make it a solemn
Practice to impose on one another, by this universal Confusion of
Characters and Persons.
After a while, he would not be able to help laughing
when he had perceiv’d what was carrying on. The EUROPEANS, on
their side, might laugh perhaps at this Simplicity. But our
ETHIOPIAN wou’d certainly laugh with better reason. ‘Tis easy to
see which of the two wou’d be ridiculous. For he who laughs, and is
himself ridiculous, bears a double share of Ridicule.
However, if after the carnival, when the Europeans have changed
their habit, the Ethiopian should, at
the sight of a natural Face and Habit, laugh just as heartily as before;
wou’d not he in his turn become ridiculous, by carrying the Jest too
far; when by a silly Presumption he took Nature for mere Art, and

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mistook perhaps a Man of Sobriety and Sense for one of those
ridiculous Mummers? (46-48 [82-83])
It is no coincidence that the Ethiopian is transported to either Venice
or Paris: in Sensus Communis, Shaftesbury juxtaposes his own
philosophy with that of Hobbes, who, as the theorist of absolutism,
represented the antithesis to almost all the libertarian ideals espoused
by the Earl.31 As the true Whig propagandist, Shaftesbury did of
course associate absolutism with Catholicism: “The higher the
Slavery, the more exquisite the Buffoonery.”32
This propagandistic aphorism from Sensus Communis (32 [72])
draws a direct line between political systems and the modes of
raillery these encourage. Shaftesbury has been chastised for the “large
helping of British chauvinism” with which his theory of humor is
served (Critchley 84), but his remark that “the greatest Buffoons are
the ITALIANS” needs to be seen within this political and religious
context. Those who suffer under “the spiritual Tyranny” Shaftesbury
believed was exerted by the Italian and French systems can only
laugh under the mask of “Buffoonery and Burlesque” (Sensus
Communis 34 [71-72]). What he therefore does in Miscellaneous
Reflections, wearing the mask of the satirist, is to insinuate that
Britain was in danger of losing its liberties if the High-Church Tories,
those men the Earl associated with Jacobitism and absolutist tendencies,
were to prevail at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. It
was exceedingly difficult to employ “the genteelest Wit” against “the
most scurrilous Buffoonery” (Sensus Communis 22 [63]) in such a
potentially oppressive climate.33 He was now paying his political
enemies and critics such as Astell back in their own coin – that of open,
vitriolic attack.
It is tempting and actually fitting to reconsider the carnival
episode in a Bakhtinian context. For Bakhtin, carnival is at the same
time subversive and conservative, destructive and constructive: “It
asserts and denies, it buries and revives.” He applies this ambivalence to
31. See, however, the section on “The Literary Context” above.
32. In Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury numbers Ethiopia among the
traditional hotbeds of superstition (74-76 [48-49]) – this makes the Ethiopians
laughter all the more scathing.
33. When he was writing Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury had recently
been implicated in the Sacheverell affair, six passages from the Letter being quoted
during the trials under the headings “Blasphemy, Irreligion, and Heresy” and “The
Church and Clergy abus’d” (Collections 23-24 and 28).

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the theory of satire, distinguishing between laughter’s carnivalesque
and satirical functions: while “festive laughter” sees the individual
include itself in “the wholeness of the world […] the satirist whose
laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery,
he is opposed to it;” this means that “that which appears comic becomes
a private reaction” (Bakhtin 12). In Sensus Communis, however, this
view finds its reversal: the masked subversion that ostensibly
characterizes the carnival is the slavish antithesis to the free, mildly
satirical intercourse among gentlemen in the club.34 The context of
(inter)subjectivity (Sigler) that pervades the Ethiopian episode juxtaposes
the vulgar laughter generated by carnivalesque buffoonery with the
subtly ironic laughter of the libertarian, gentlemanly variety, which is
based on mutual consent. The reforming power of masked and
therefore distorted laughter, covering “the Spirit of Bigotry, and false
Zeal,” fizzles out; for Shaftesbury, the carnivalesque persona of
satirical comedy merely stifles the desperate cry of an enslaved people.
At the same time, however, the manner of the Horatian “Satyrick
Pieces” includes precisely the rigorous self-inspection executed in
Miscellaneous Reflections: applying the program of a “self-discoursing
Practice” (Soliloquy 54 [164]) to the views espoused over the course
of the foregoing treatises. Under a persona, the satirical miscellany
becomes for Shaftesbury the literary mode in which to conduct in
public the private self-inspection of the Askêmata, and to apply the
test of ridicule to his own writings.
Conclusions
Leibniz famously criticized the Letter concerning Enthusiasm,
“particularly in what relates to the too great Concessions of
[Shaftesbury] in favour of Raillery and the way of Humor.”35 In reply
to this charge, the Earl says that he “seems to despise himself” for
returning, in the Miscellanies, “to his mix’d Satyrical Way of Raillery
and Irony, so fashionable in our Nation,” and I believe he is making a
34. Critchley rightly interprets the episode as an “argument against the alleged
subversive potential of carnivalesque, buffonic comedy” (82). Thomas Docherty
draws a similar analogy as Shaftesbury sends the Ethiopian to Europe “during one of
those carnivalesque rituals of proto-Bakhtinian comic masking in which social
regulation is ostensibly called into question” (74).
35. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 25 July 1712 NS (The National Archives: PRO
30/24/23/9, fols 130v-131r). See Recueil de diverses pièces 2.269-86.

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rather complex point here. At the end of his Characteristicks of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, a work designed both to identify and to
redefine current standards of beauty, truth, and virtue, he holds up the
satirical mirror to contemporary society. Miscellaneous Reflections is
a carnivalesque text in its own right; it enables him not only to
practice, under a satirical persona, Horatian self-inspection, but also
to show his readers the distorted taste of the times – the text is at the
same time constructive and destructive. It is precisely this see-sawing
between the positive and negative aspects of laughter that permeates
the three volumes of Characteristicks. The laughter envisioned in the
first volume, laughter in the spirit of Socratic irony, turns into pure spite
in the last volume – a shift indeed from construction to destruction.
To point out that the Earl did clearly see himself as a Horatian
satirist, one attacking an empire that was in danger of degenerating
into a hotbed of superstition and oppression, is, then, to acknowledge the
tension underlying his views on laughter and humor. Obviously,
Shaftesbury’s characterization of Horace is the key to any inter-
pretation of his own views:
All these woud be endless Contradictions, and must appear so to any
one, if the Periods of Horace’s Life and his Revolutions be not
understood together with the Revolutions in the Roman State and
Horace’s Engagements both there and in the Court, with the natural
Effect, which such Originall Principles together with time and Age,
and a Love of Studdy and Philosophy must necessarily have had on
such a Man.36
Only the various contexts in which Shaftesbury found himself
immersed throughout his writing career help us understand his theory
of laughter and its seemingly “endless Contradictions.” He may have
attempted himself to give humor free play, advocating that others
follow suit, and to liberate the satirist from his carnivalesque persona,
but at the same time he postulated that this could be done only in private
or in select circles from whence the laughter would not pass beyond
carefully defined boundaries. Moreover, he obviously felt the need to
hide in public behind an authorial mask which he simultaneously
looked on as a symbol of oppression;37 he was not able to circumvent
the necessity of devising elaborate rhetorical guises (or “to exchange
36. Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, 15 November 1706 (Part 3, fols 430v-431r).
37. For the Earl’s reflections about his ‘public mask’ in Askêmata (for example
142, 356), see Klein 91-96.

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the Tragick Buskin for an easier and more natural Gate and Habit”
Sensus Communis 36 [74]), artifices which seem to belie his ideal of
plainness and simplicity.38 These points reflect the limitations of
Shaftesbury’s theory when it came down to a practical application in
the face not only of prevailing social circumstances, but also of the
more destructive, “Irrationall & Brutall” aspects of human nature.39
Such considerations hindered the implementation of a demanding
theory which, despite its undeniable appeal, also had a darker side:
when Billig speaks of laughter’s “disciplinary function in the interests
of creating the good society” in Shaftesbury (78), he points out its
almost Foucaultian scope – its “disciplinary function” is, at least in
Miscellaneous Reflections, redeployed from the religious fanatics to
the political enemies. These could not be tickled into virtue, but only
whipped.
Despite these reservations, such a notion of laughter includes, one
might say, a utopian element: the vision of a society governed by liberal
virtuoso-gentlemen who would also set its standards of humor and
laughter – a vision which was to remain, as time has all too drastically
shown, a figment of Shaftesbury’s philosophical imagination. However,
seen purely within the context of his writings and of his times, the
Earl’s theory of laughter is, as a “litmus test in assessing the state of a
given society,” uncommonly effective (Pfister vii). It reflects the status
quo of a society that was, towards the end of the War of the Spanish
Succession, torn between the claims of conservative and progressive
forces, between an absolutist past and an enlightened future. The
paradoxes arising from this tension are by no means resolved in
Characteristicks, but they pervade and shape Shaftesbury’s thought to
an extraordinary degree.
Patrick MÜLLER
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg
38. This may explain why, in the unpublished Plasticks (see 165-68), Shaftesbury
pondered at some length about the proper rhetorical strategies for his next
philosophical project, Second Characters. I am indebted to Mark-Georg Dehrmann
for this insight.
39. Lord Ashley to John Locke, 29 September 1694 (Bodleian Library, MS Locke c.
7, fols 112-13).

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