Bernard de, an author of considerable celebrity in his day, was born about the year 1670 at Dort in Holland. After studying physic at Leyden, where he took the degree of doctor in that faculty, Mandeville came over to England, and commenced practising his profession in London. His success as a physician was not great; but taking to writing, he succeeded in gaining a livelihood, and establishing for himself more than an ordinary share of notoriety. He published his first work in 1709—The Virgin Unmasked, or Female Dialogues betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and her Niece on several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, &c. The work is characterized by anything but delicacy; and whatever may have been Mandeville's design in writing it, no one will be inclined to regard it as calculated to promote female virtue and innocence. In 1711 he published a work, in three dialogues, full of pungent remarks on modern medical practice, entitled A Treatise on the Hypochondriacal and Hysteric Passions. His short poem of The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest, appeared in 1714, and was afterwards expanded and published in 1723, under the well-known title of the Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. This work, erroneous as it is in its views of morals and society, is much superior to his first publication; and while written with apparent honesty and sincerity of purpose, it nevertheless exposed its author to no ordinary degree of obloquy, provoking answers and attacks on all sides, and was finally, together with the London Journal, a paper to which Mandeville contributed, denounced as immoral, and proscribed by the grand jury of Middlesex. He kept silent till 1728, when he published a second part of the Fable of the Bees, to illustrate the design and vindicate the intention of the first. He published also, in 1720, *Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness*; and in 1732, *An Inquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War*, a work abounding in paradox. He died on the 21st January 1733, in his sixty-third year. Sir John Hawkins, in his *Life of Dr Johnson*, says, that Mandeville was partly supported by a pension from "some vulgar Dutch merchants," and was a frequent guest at the table of the first Earl of Macclesfield. The *Fable of the Bees*, as a satire on men and manners, is just and pleasant, betraying powers of shrewd, happy, subtle observation, by no means common; but as a theory of society and national happiness, it is altogether false and worthless, calculated—however its author might disallow such an inference—to lower the standard of morality, if not to encourage vice and irreligion.

It is his object to show that national greatness depends on the prevalence of fraud and luxury. We find no distinction in his system between luxury and vice; he indeed boldly contends that virtue and vice, and the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation, have been infused into men by their several governments for the preservation of society, and the maintenance of their own power. Of the host of assailants who attacked Mandeville, the most distinguished were,—William Law, whose remarks on the *Fable of the Bees* have lately been republished, with an introductory essay by F. D. Maurice; Hutcheson, author of *An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue*; and Bishop Berkeley in his *Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher*.

Mandeville, Sir John de, the first English prose writer, was born at St Alban's about the beginning of the fourteenth century. Sprung from a good family, he received a liberal education, and seems to have practised for some time as a physician. He set out on his travels in 1322, and repaired to the Holy Land. After serving successively under the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of Cathay, and journeying through Tartary, Persia, Armenia, India, and other countries, he returned to England about 1355. Not long after this he began to write a narrative of his adventures, which he dedicated to Edward III. He is said to have died at Liège in 1372. Mandeville's work presents a singular mixture of fact and fable. Minutely and candidly he relates his own observations regarding the countries he visited and the men whom he met. With the same truthfulness, whenever an opportunity occurs, he copies descriptions of monsters from Pliny, accounts of miracles from legends, and fables from old romancers. His book, written originally in Latin, was translated by himself into French, and ultimately into English. The original manuscript of this last translation is in the Cotton Library. The best edition is that published under the title of *The Voyage and Travaille of Ser John Mandeville, knight*, 8vo, London, 1725, and reprinted in 1839, "with an introduction, additional notes, and a glossary by J. O. Halliwell, Esq., P.S.A., F.R.A.S."