SOURCE: Hayman, John G. “Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 10, no. 2 (spring 1970): 491-504.

In the following essay, Hayman examines Shaftesbury's use of a literary persona that embodies flexibility, composure, grace, and penetration, which the critic says marks the author as a deliberate artist.

The preoccupation of Swift and Pope with the creation of personae has naturally received a good deal of attention, but the extent to which this preoccupation was also shared by other writers of the period has perhaps been insufficiently recognized. In discussions of Shaftesbury, for example, commentators have usually paid merely token respects to the gentlemanly air of his discourses and have then concentrated on the ideas that they advance.¹ Yet Shaftesbury was a highly conscious, if not altogether successful, literary artist, as much concerned with embodying and describing intellectual dispositions as with advancing a systematic body of...