The third earl of Shaftesbury was important in his own day for his stress on the ultimate importance of the emotions in moral behavior--indeed was assumed to have invented the concept of "moral sense," before this idea was recognized as but part of a broad shift in the basis of ethics from reason to emotion. He was also famous in his own times for his attacks on religious enthusiasm. Today, perhaps, we are more concerned with him as an innovator in aesthetics, though recognition of this aspect of his work was slow in coming. It was first seen in his works by German writers such as Schiller, and from their writings, a focus primarily on the role of the creator of a literary work, rather than on its structure or on its impact on the reader, became a central part of the aesthetics of English Romanticism.

The son...