which they would never have used, and sentiments which they never held and which could not be fairly deduced from their writings.  Not that Bishop Berkeley ever wrote with conscious unfairness.  The truly Christian, if somewhat eccentric character of the man forbids such a supposition for one moment.  His error, no doubt, arose from the vagueness with which the terms Deist, Freethinker, Naturalist, Atheist, were used indiscriminately to stigmatise men of very different views.  There was, for example, little or nothing in common between such men as Lord Shaftesbury and Mandeville.  The atrocious sentiment of the ‘Fable of the Bees,’ that private vices are public benefits, was not the sentiment of any true Deist.  Yet Shaftesbury and Mandeville are the two writers who are most constantly alluded to as representatives of one and the same system, in this dialogue.  Indeed the confusion here spoken of is apparent in Berkeley’s own advertisement.  ’The author’s design being to consider the Freethinker in the various lights of Atheist, libertine, enthusiast, scorner, critic, metaphysician, fatalist, and sceptic, it must not therefore be imagined that every one of these characters agrees with every individual Freethinker; no more being implied than that each part agrees with some or other of the sect.’  The fallacy here arises from the assumption of a sect with a coherent system, which, as has been stated above, never had any existence.

The principle upon which Berkeley tells us that he constructed his dialogue is a dangerous one.  ‘It must not,’ he writes, ’be thought that authors are misrepresented if every notion of Alciphron or Lysicles is not found precisely in them.  A gentleman in private conference may be supposed to speak plainer than others write, to improve on their hints, and draw conclusions from their principles.’  Yes; but this method of development, when carried out by a vehement partisan, is apt to find hints where there are no hints, and draw conclusions which are quite unwarranted by the premisses.

It is somewhat discouraging to an aspirant after literary immortality, to reflect that in spite of the enormous amount of learned writing which the Deistical controversy elicited, many educated people who have not made the subject a special study, probably derive their knowledge of the Deists mainly from two unpretentious volumes—­Leland’s ’View of the Deistical Writers.’

Leland avowedly wrote as an advocate, and therefore it would be unreasonable to expect from him the measured judgment of a philosophical historian.  But as an advocate he wrote with great fairness,—­indeed, considering the excitement which the Deists raised among their contemporaries, with wonderful fairness.  It is not without reason that he boasts in his preface, ’Great care has been taken to make a fair representation of them, according to the best judgment I could form of their designs.’  But, besides the fact that the representations of a man who holds a brief