sarcasms there was further a firm philosophical commitment that informed the rhetoric of all his earlier work. Ridicule, he asserted in 1729, “is both a proper and necessary Method of Discourse in many Cases, and especially in the Case of Gravity, when that is attended with Hypocrisy or Imposture, or with Ignorance, or with soureness of Temper and Persecution: all which ought to draw after them the Ridicule and Contempt of the Society, which has no other effectual Remedy against such Methods of Imposition” (p. 22).

For the modern reader the Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony is the most satisfactory of Collins’s many pamphlets and books. It lacks the pretentiousness of the Scheme, the snide convolutions of the Grounds and Reasons, the argument by half-truths of the Discourse of Free-Thinking. His last work is free of the curious ambivalence which marked so many of his earlier pieces, a visible uncertainty which made him fear repression and yet court it. On the contrary, his last work is in fact a justification of his rhetorical mode and religious beliefs; it is an apologia pro vita sua written with all the intensity and decisiveness that such a justification demands. To be sure, it takes passing shots at old enemies like Swift, but never with rancor. And while its language is frequently ironical, its thinking makes an earnest defense of wit as a weapon of truth. The essay sets forth its author as an animal ridens, a creature that through laughter and affable cynicism worships a universal God and respects a rational mankind.

Brown University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, No. 98 (22 August 1730).

2. To Des Maizeaux (5 May 1717): B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, ff. 129-130.

3. To Des Maizeaux (9 February 1716): B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 123.

4. The title page of the Scheme is dated 1726. It was not advertised in the newspapers or journals of that year—a strange silence for any of Collins’s work. Its first notice appeared in the Monthly Catalogue: Being a General Register of Books, Sermons, Plays, Poetry, Pamphlets, &c. Printed and Publish’d in London, or the Universities, during the Month of May, 1727 (see No. 49). Yet we know that the Scheme had been remarked upon as early as March when on the 10th of that month Samuel Chandler published his Reflections on the Conduct of the Modern Deists in their late Writings against Christianity. (For the dating of Chandler’s work, see the Daily Courant [10 March 1727].) We know also that the Scheme went to a second edition late in 1727 and was frequently advertised in the Daily Post between 2 January and 20 January 1728.

5. For the statement about the Letter to Dr. Rogers, see B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 220 (15 August 1727). For that on the use of “personal matters” in controversy, see B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 170 (27 December 1719); cf. The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (London, 1726), pp. 422-438.

6. The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion was published in London within the first four days of January 1724; see the advertisement in the Daily Post (4 January 1724). A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing was published on or close to 17 March 1729; see the advertisement in the Daily Journal for that date.

7. We can generally fix the date of Rogers’s Eight Sermons within the first two months of 1727 because it was answered early by Samuel Chandler’s Reflections on the Conduct of the Modern Deists. (See note 4.) For the dating of Collins’s rebuttal, see the Monthly Catalogue, No. 49 (May 1727).

8. To Des Maizeaux (24 June 1727): B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, ff. 218-219.

9. For the dating of this work, see the Daily Post (31 January 1728).

10. For Swift’s satire, see Mr. C---ns’s Discourse of Free-Thinking, Put into plain English, by way of Abstract, for the Use of the Poor. For Bentley’s devastating probe of Collins’s scholarly inadequacies, see his Remarks on the Discourse of Free-Thinking. By Phileleutherus Lipsiensis. Both works appeared in 1713.

11. Scheme, pp. 432-433.

12. Edward Chandler, A Defence of Christianity from the Prophecies of the Old Testament (London, 1725), p. ii.

13. A Letter to Dr. Rogers, p. 89.

14. A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (London, 1710), p. 24.

15. Robert Jenkin, A Brief Confutation of the Pretences against Natural and Revealed Religion (London, 1702), p. 40.

16. For Collins on his own rhetorical skills, see Scheme, p. 402; William Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, Demonstrated (London, 1846), III, 199.

17. Jenkin, Brief Confutation, p. 51; for the