Note 57 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of “three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each” (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais—in Œuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch of his life (1733) says that “the sale of Mr. Woolston’s works was very great.” In any case, Woolston’s Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox, and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are. ↑