Bernard de Mandeville figures throughout the “parleying” as author of “The Fable of the Bees”; and it is in this work that Mr. Browning discovers their special ground of sympathy.  “The Fable of the Bees,” also entitled “Private Vices Public Benefits,” and again “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest,” is meant to show that self-indulgence and self-seeking carried even to the extent of vice are required to stimulate the activities and secure the material well-being of a community.  The doctrine, as originally set forth, had at least an appearance of cynicism, and is throughout not free from conscious or unconscious sophistry; and though the theological condemnation evoked by it was nothing short of insane, we cannot wonder that the morality of the author’s purpose was impugned.  He defends this, however, in successive additions to the work, asserting and re-asserting, by statement and illustration, that his object has been to expose the vices inherent to human society—­in no sense to justify them; and Mr. Browning fully accepts the vindication and even regards it as superfluous.  He sees nothing, either in the fable itself or the commentary first attached to it, which may not equally be covered by the Christian doctrine of original sin, or the philosophic acceptance of evil as a necessary concomitant, or condition, of good:  and finds fresh guarantees for a sound moral intention in the bright humour and sound practical sense in which the book abounds.  This judgment was formed (as I have already implied) very early in Mr. Browning’s life, even before the appearance of “Pauline,” and supplies a curious comment on any impression of mental immaturity which his own work of that period may have produced.

Bernard de Mandeville was a Dutch physician, born at Dort in the second half of the last century, but who settled in England after taking his degree.  He published, besides “The Fable of the Bees,” some works of a more professional kind.  His name, as we know it, must have been Anglicized.

DANIEL BARTOLI was a Jesuit and historian of his order.  Mr. Browning characterizes him in a footnote as “a learned and ingenious writer,” and while acknowledging his blindness in matters of faith would gladly testify to his penetration in those of knowledge;[124] but the Don’s editor, Angelo Cerutti, declares in the same note that his historical work so overflows with superstition and is so crammed with accounts of prodigious miracles as to make the reading it an infliction; and the saint-worship involved in this kind of narrative is the supposed text of the “parleying.”  Mr. Browning claims Don Bartoli’s allegiance for a secular saint:  a woman more divine in her non-miraculous virtues than some at least of those whom the Church has canonized, and whose existence has the merit of not being legendary.  The saint in question was Marianne Pajot, daughter of the apothecary of Gaston Duke of Orleans; and her story, as Mr. Browning relates it, a well-known episode in the lives of Charles IV., Duke of Lorraine, and the Marquis de Lassay.