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. Voltaire sneered at the optimism of the _Essay on Man_ and of the _Characteristics_. 'Shaftesbury,' he says, 'who made the fable fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known; mis-shapen in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment.' [Sidenote: Bernard de Mandeville (1670?-1733).] Bernard de Mandeville gained much notoriety by his _Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits_ (1723). The book opens with a poem in doggrel verse called _The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned honest_, the purport of which is to show that as the bees became virtuous, they ceased to be successful. He closes with the moral that 'To enjoy the world's conveniences, Be famed in war, yet live in ease, Without great vices is a vain Utopia, seated in the brain. Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live, While we the benefits receive.' In the prose which follows the fable, Mandeville may at least claim the credit of being outspoken, and he does not scruple to say that modesty is a sham and that what seems like virtue is nothing but self-love. 'I often,' he says, 'compare the virtues of good men to your large china jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs.'