Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays ed. by Charles W. A. Prior (review)

91 essay on topographical print-making, ‘‘Portraying London Mid-Century— John Rocque and the Brothers Buck,’’ is more narrow but also useful. Finally, Roy Porter’s ‘‘The Wonderful Extent and Variety of London’’ sweeps over the whole of mid-century London in Mr. Porter’s usual dazzling manner,wherebymistakes in details are usually atoned for by the grandeur of the generalizations.Whoelse but Mr. Portercouldsupporthisstatement that during ‘‘the Georgian century the Church’s role in daily life in the city was on the wane’’ with the sole example of Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation? The illustrations gathered for each geographical section—divided into The City; The River; Covent Garden and Bloomsbury; Westminster; St. James and Mayfair—are further subdivided by topics . ‘‘The City’’ has, among others, subsections on city politics, banking, coins, coin balance and weights, street criers, and a most useful group of illustrations (with explanations) pertaining to Elizabeth Canning, including a print of the floor plan of the house at Enfield Wash where she was a ‘‘prisoner.’’ All readers will discover things they did not know. One can discover why ‘‘bone china’’ has that name, why labor actions are called ‘‘strikes,’’who was the bald-headed colonel of the Royal Horse Guards, when and where Canaletto and Mozart lived in London, and who gave up the house in Bloomsbury that became the British Museum. One comes away having learned a great deal; one learns enough, in fact, almost—but not quite— to waive mention of the excessive times when cross-references remain as the editorial notation, ‘‘00.’’ Melvyn New University of Florida Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays , ed. Charles W. A. Prior. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 2000. Pp.144. $10 (paper). Six of the seven essays in this book were given at a 1997 symposium at Queen’s University (Ontario). The remaining essay, the best of a good lot, was written for the collection. J. A. W. Gunn places Mandeville’s thought on political dissent in two contexts, the first historical , the second scholarly. During the first three decades of the eighteenth century, England was ‘‘coming to terms with liberty .’’AftertheGloriousRevolution,government ministers faced the delicate task of discouraging political attacks without denying the right of private citizens to a voice in public business. Mandeville saw the self-serving and uninformed criticism of those out of power and the frequent incompetence and selfishness of those in power subsumed within a system that provided for the nation’s security. Mr. Gunn skillfully uses Mandeville to counter Habermas’s modern theory that the vox populi was a single unanimous entity, a theory more properly applied to the French milieu. For Gordon Schochet, Mandeville’s Free Thoughts ‘‘belongs to a distinctive type . . . of writing that ‘detheologised’ religion and regarded it instead in social and political terms.’’Mr. Schochetisright about Mandeville’s secular slantanddoes a good job of providing summaries of background but seems at times unsympathetic to Mandeville’s endorsement of the established church. Mr. Prior covers some of the same ground in his examination of Mandeville and anti-Catholicism . Mandeville viewed alarmist cries of ‘‘Popery’’ (‘‘that terrible Trysyllable ,’’ in the words of a contemporary) 92 as the ‘‘pernicious by-product of party strife.’’ Since we know next to nothing about Mandeville’spersonalreligious beliefs or behavior, Mr. Prior draws attention to the views in his writings: these ‘‘have little to do with faith and doctrine; rather, he is concerned with how religion may act as a force that is disruptive of social harmony.’’ Examining the logic of Mandeville’s defenses of The Fable of the Bees, a work that ‘‘became famous because it was denounced ,’’W. W. Goldsmith is most helpful when he comments on rhetorical issues , such as why Hume and AdamSmith found it intheirintereststodistancethemselves from Mandeville, although his explanations of human motivation and behavior were similar to theirown. Hisview of rhetorical argument, however, seems naı̈ve: ‘‘Mandeville claims to have been misunderstood, it is true, butwhathedoes is not only to defend what he has written but also to reiterate the offensive passages .’’ Thomas Stumpf seems a better reader of Mandeville’scomplexironiesin his look at the ‘‘peculiarly Mandevillean twists to the idea of the Golden Age’’ in The...