Note 42 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

In Swift’s Sentiments of a Church of England Man (1708) the specialized word is found definitely and abusively connoting religious unbelief: “The atheists, libertines, despisers of religion—that is to say, all those who usually pass under the name of freethinkers”; Steele and Addison so use it in the Tatler in 1709;42 and Leslie so uses the term in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711). The anonymous essay, Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes (Amsterdam, 1712), is translated in English (1713) as Reflections on the Death of Free-thinkers, and the translator uses the term in his prefatory Letter to the Author, beside putting it in the text (pp. 50, 85, 97, 102, 106, etc.), where the original had esprit fort.