First edition, posthumously published. The ten letters here were written by Shaftesbury to a protégé, Michael Ainsworth, whilst at Oxford (1707-1710). Shaftesbury’s own teacher, John Locke, features in a number of them, receiving from his erstwhile pupil both praise (‘No one has done more towards the recalling of philosophy from barbarity, into use and practice of the world … No one has opened a better or clearer way to reasoning’, pp. 4-5) and, more famously, censure: ‘’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundementals, threw order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds’ (p. 39).

Not in Yolton.

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