Sir John, a physician celebrated on account of his travels, was born at St Albans, about the beginning of the fourteenth century. He received a liberal education, and applied himself to the study of physic; but being at length seized with an invincible desire of visiting distant parts of the globe, he left England in 1332, and did not return till thirty-four years thereafter. His friends, who had long supposed him dead, did not know him when he reappeared amongst them. He had travelled throughout almost all the East, and had made himself master of a great variety of languages. In particular, he had visited Scythia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Media, Mesopotamia, Persia, Chaldaea, Greece, Dalmatia, and various other countries. He afterwards went to Liège, where he appears to have passed under the name of Joannes de Barbam, and died in November 1372. His design seems to have been to commit to writing whatever he had heard, read, or learned, concerning the places which he visited. Hence he has taken descriptions of monsters from Pliny, copied accounts of miracles from legends, and related fabulous stories upon the authority of authors who are now classed as mere romancers; so that many, perhaps most, of the falsehoods in his work properly belong to preceding writers, who, however much they may now be despised or disregarded, were considered as of good credit at the time when he wrote. But there does not appear to be any good reason why he should not be believed in regard to circumstances which he relates from his own observation. Mandeville was a good linguist, and wrote his Travels in Latin, from which he translated them into French, then into English, and lastly into Italian. The English edition is entitled "The Voyage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville, knight," London, 1568, 4to, reprinted in 1684 in the same form, and again in 1727, 8vo. The original English manuscript is in the Cotton Library. The English editions are the more valuable to us, from having been written in the language used by our countrymen three hundred years ago, when the orthography of English was so little fixed that it seems to have been a fashionable affectation amongst writers to spell the same words in the greatest variety of ways imaginable. Addison's pretended discovery of Sir John Mandeville's manuscripts, and the pleasant fiction of the freezing and thawing of several short speeches made by Sir John in the territories of Nova Zembla, must be known to most of our readers. (See Tatler, with annotations, vol. iv. No. 254, edition of 1806.)

Mandeville, Bernard, an author of very considerable celebrity in his day, was born about the year 1670, in Holland, where he studied physic, and took the degree of doctor in that faculty. He afterwards came to England, and wrote several works which, though not devoid of ingenuity, inculcate principles little calculated to advance the interests of society. In 1709, he published his Virgin Unmasked, in the form of a dialogue between an old maiden aunt and her niece, upon love, marriage, and other topics therewith connected, which are treated in a manner not calculated to promote female virtue and innocence. In 1711, appeared his Treatise on the Hypochondriac and Hysteric Passions; a work which is divided into three dialogues, and contains some shrewd remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries. In 1714, he published a poem entitled the Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest, upon which he afterwards wrote remarks, and enlarged the whole into his well-known publication, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices made Public Virtues, which was printed at London in 1723. In the preface to this book he observes that, having met with several who, since the first publication of his poem, had wilfully or ignorantly affirmed that it was intended as a satire upon virtue and morality, and written for the encouragement of vice, he had resolved, whenever it should be reprinted, to apprise the reader of the real intent with which it had been composed, and of the object which he had in view in the composition of the poem. In this, however, he was not by any means fortunate; for the book was in the same year proscribed by the grand jury of Middlesex, and severely animadverted on in a letter printed in the London Journal of the 27th July 1723. Mandeville endeavoured to vindicate his book from the imputations cast upon it both in the letter just mentioned and in the presentment of the grand jury; though, as it appears, with but little success. He was attacked by various writers, who all united in denouncing the principles therein inculcated, and in representing them as equally hostile to morality and pernicious Mandingo, to society. To these, however, he made no reply until 1728, when he published, in one volume 8vo, the second part of the Fable of the Bees, intended to illustrate the design and defend the intention of the first. In 1720, appeared his Free Thoughts on Religion, founded on what is called the rational system; and, in 1732, came out his Inquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, a work abounding in questionable doctrines and paradoxical opinions. Mandeville died on the 21st of January 1733, in the sixty-third year of his age. He is said to have been coarse and overbearing in his manners, where he durst be so, yet a flatterer of the great, and also of "some vulgar Dutch merchants who allowed him a pension." He lived in obscure lodgings in London, and never had much practice as a physician; but he was patronised, it is said, by the first Earl of Macclesfield, at whose table he was a frequent guest, and had there an unlimited license to indulge his wit as well as his appetite, both of which appear to have been sufficiently unscrupulous. In his writings there are many remarks equally ingenious and just; he was a shrewd observer of men and manners, and often singularly happy in recording the results of his experience; but the general principles inculcated in some of his works have been almost universally reprobated, as calculated to depress the standard of morality, if not to encourage vice and irreligion.

Amongst the assailants of the Fable of the Bees may be mentioned Dr Fiddes, in the preface to his General Treatise of Morality, printed in 1724; Mr John Dennis, in his Vice and Luxury Public Mischiefs, 1724; Mr William Law, in Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees, 1724; Mr Bluet, in his Inquiry whether the general Practice of Virtue tends to the Wealth or Poverty, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People, 1725; Mr Hutcheson, author of an Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; and Mr Archibald Campbell, in his Αἰσθητικής. Mandeville's notions were likewise animadverted on by Bishop Berkeley in his Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, printed in 1732. This drew from Mandeville a reply, which was published the same year in the form of a letter to Dion, occasioned by his book called Alciphron; and there also appeared a pamphlet containing some Remarks on the Minute Philosopher, in a Letter to a Country Clergyman from his friend in London, the anonymous author of which (supposed to have been John Lord Harvey) interposes in the controversy with much apparent impartiality. It is not necessary, however, to multiply details respecting a work which is no longer read except by the learned. The leading error in the Fable of the Bees consists in the author not sufficiently distinguishing between what is and what ought to be; between vices properly so called, and mere superfluities or articles of luxury and refinement, which are the natural and useful accompaniments of certain conditions of life, and, in themselves, neither objects of praise nor of censure. As to his propensity to trace good actions to bad motives, and his disposition to exhibit on all occasions the dark side of human nature, no apology can be offered for it; and the best test of public estimation is the general neglect into which his writings have fallen. (See the First Preliminary Dissertation, prefixed to this work.)