their dominion might seem to threaten anarchy, are so composed and arranged that under the influence of society their apparent discords harmonize to the public good. This immensely complicated adjustment is not the effect of premeditated effort, but is the automatic reaction of man in society; premeditated effort could only bungle and interfere with the complex social harmony which the facts of man's nature have of themselves created and will maintain. Thus, from this conception of human nature, the laissezfaire, or individualistic, theory of economics naturally followeda descendant of ethical speculation.

Now, as has been indicated above, the relations between Mandeville and the ethical philosophers of his age were very close, especially as to the conception of human nature which underlies the economic theory of Smith and of Hume. Indeed, this conception cf human nature, without which there would have been no philosophy of laissez-faire, and with which there could hardly help but be, is specifically Mandeville's. It is Mandeville who describes man as a mechanism of personal interests, which, however, functions in society for the public benefit. Mandeville is the creator of the "economic man" about whom Smith and Hume built their system. The laissez-faire theorists who followed Mandeville, whatever they may have said about his terminology of "vice" and "virtue," accepted his analysis of human nature, and used it, without adding essentially to its completeness, as the foundation of their systems."

This sketch of Mandeville's influence on economic thought through the division of labor theory, the defense of luxury, and the laissezfaire philosophy does not exhaust his consequence in the field of economics; nor is our view of his general importance complete when we have added to his total effect on economics his commanding position in the development of the utilitarian movement. To complete our picture we should have to study the significance of that mass

"Schatz has developed this matter in his "Bernard de Mandeville" (in Vierteljahrschrift für Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte for 1903, 1, 434-80). Hume, it is true, came finally to assert the reality of benevolence, and Smith had always maintained this. However, their analysis of human nature really paralleled Mandeville's; they differed only in giving the same compassionate emotions contrary names, as Hutcheson did (see above, note 48). And, apart from that, in their economic writings they concentrated on man as a selfish mechanism, leaving his benevolence to be considered in more ethical works.

of fertile theory, embracing everything from anthropology to criminology, with which his work is crammed; we should have to analyze the possible effect of his other books, such as his once popular Treatise on the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases and his Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn, which, according to J. M. Robertson, anticipated Howard's prison reforms; 73 we should need to consider the effect he exerted on outstanding figures like Hazlitt and Rousseau, and to add to our estimate a fact with which this paper has not been concerned―. that the Fable of the Bees is the work of a literary genius. Only then should we have a full portrayal of the significance of a man who was perhaps among the half dozen English writers of the eighteenth century who most profoundly influenced the course of civilization.

Northwestern University.

"Essays towards a Critical Method (1889), p. 219.

How well you tell of your high feastings, of your Saturnalian merriment!-How well you tell of the joys of winter in the country, and of the strong must quaffed by the jolly fireside! But why do you complain that poetry is a runaway from wining and dining? Song loves Bacchus, and Bacchus loves song. Apollo was not ashamed to wear the green clusters, nay even to put the ivy of the wine-god above his own laurel. Many a time the nine Muses have mixed with the Bacchic chorus crying Euoe on the Heliconian hills. Those verses which Ovid sent from the fields of Thrace were bad, because there were no feasts there and no vineyards. What but roses and the grape-laden vine did Anacreon sing in those tiny staves of his? Teumesian Bacchus inspired Pindar's strain; each page of his breathes ardor from the drained cup, as he sings of the crash of the heavy chariot overturned, and the rider flying by, dark with the dust of the Elean race-course. The Roman lyrist drank first of the four-year-old vintage, ere he sang so sweetly of Glycera and blond-haired Chloe. The sinews of your genius, too, draw strength from the nobly laden table. Your Massic cups foam with a rich vein of song; you pour bottled verses straight from the jar.

What roistering bard is this? The Latin elegiacs of which I have read a translation breathe a spirit of Horace and Ovid; they might be proudly claimed by either of those vinous souls and polished poets. As both of them are mentioned, the author of these lines lived after their time. Here is how his Latin sounds,-I cite the closing verses of the passage, beginning with what he says of Horace:

1

Quadrimoque madens lyricen Romanus Iaccho
Dulce canit Glyceran flavicomamque Chloen.

This paper was read in part at a meeting of the Philological Society of the University of North Carolina on February 7, 1922.

Iam quoque lauta tibi generoso mensa paratu
Mentis alit vires, ingeniumque fovet.
Massica foecundam despumant pocula venam,

Fundis et ex ipso condita metra cado.

Such verse, you will admit, has the right flavor; it smacks of a mellow and an ancient vintage. Who could have written it, if we must exclude Horace and Ovid? It is very like the latter author; he would willingly have slipped the poem into one of his little books, possibly emending the remark about his own bad verses. What of Martial? He could turn out a poem in any style, depending on the taste of his patron. But I have somewhat falsified the text. Consult the original and you will see that our poet is describing not the Saturnalia but Christmas. His feasters sip French wine, by an English fireside. We are many centuries remote from Horace and Ovid and Martial. The Middle Ages have passed. So has the Renaissance; or rather it has reached the consummation of its revived and Classical art in the writer of these verses, John Milton.

Those of you who had not thought of the Puritan Milton as one of the best poetical consolers for thirsty wanderers in the great American Sahara, I hope are properly surprised. The reason may be that you have paid less attention to his Latin poems than to those in our own tongue. Milton was only twenty-one when he penned the verses I have quoted. He sent them to his best of friends, Charles Diodati, a young Englishman of Italian parentage. Though the imagery of the poem is antique, it talks about concerns of the moment, the poet's friend and his pleasures, and the verses which they have interchanged. Diodati had vowed that he could not write poetry because he was having such a good time in the Christmas holidays. Milton, in a pretty vein of banter, replies with a sentiment frequently expressed by the ancient poets, "My dear fellow, you forget. The old bards were always mellow from deep potation before they ventured to put pen to paper. You ought under present circumstances to be polishing off something exceptionally fine." He then goes on to tell of his own plans and of the far different inspiration on which a writer of high poetry, as distinguished from the sort that he was writing then, needed to draw. This is a prelude to the announcement of a poem in English on which he was then at work and which was to contain little of Ovid. We will return to it later.

For the most part, Milton is a young Ovid at the time when he wrote the lines that I have quoted. One of his poems describes the coming of spring (Eleg. v). It is Pagan from beginning to end, joyous in spirit, sensuous in flavor, perfect in form. Really if Milton had written it on musty parchment and had somebody discover it, the Classical pundits of his day would have proved beyond question by all the tests of scholarship that a lost work of Ovid had come to light. So with most of the other pieces that he collected into a tiny book of "elegies." To write them, he must have known his Ovid virtually by heart, not merely the Metamorphoses, which then and now make the best possible introduction to the world of romance and human charm preserved in the old Greek myths, but all the poems of Ovid, Fasti and Ibis as well as the poor verses of lamentation poured forth on the shores of the Black Sea, and of course, as Milton is writing elegy, the love poems, Amores, with Heroides and the Art of Love. The imitation is of the subtlest kind. There were no scientific works accessible in Milton's time, as there are now, on Ovid's versification, with imposing tables of statistics in which you can find the percentage of dactyls in any foot of the verse. It was a primitive age; our youthful poet had merely absorbed all the niceties of Ovid's art without cataloguing them. In looking back over these years, Milton speaks of the "smooth Elegiack Poets, whereof the Schools are not scarce. Whom, both for the pleasing sound of their numerous (melodious) writing, which in imitation I found most easie, and most agreeable to natures part in me, and for their matter, which what it is, there be few who know not, I was so allur❜d to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome." 2 But let none imagine that the experiences, real or imaginary, recorded in Milton's Latin poems, match those of Ovid. In his nearest approach to an Ovidian episode, he describes his youthful contempt of Cupid and tells how the winged god took revenge on him one bright Mayday in his nineteenth year. Here is what befell him. (Eleg. VII, 51 ff.)

And now I took my pleasure, sometimes in the city parks, where our citizens promenade, sometimes at neighboring country-places. Crowds of girls, with faces like to the faces of goddesses, came and went radiantly

An Apology... (for) Smectymnuus, in Works, Ed. Pickering, 1851, vol. III, p. 269.