ABSTRACT
The tracing of so-called literary influences is a dangerous and generally a profitless pursuit. Shaftesbury’s influence played an important part in popularizing the Palladian style of architecture. Shaftesbury’s influence in the field of philosophy was not as great as in the arts. However, in ethics he remained a considerable figure. Shaftesbury was interpreted in Scandinavia as one who exalted a life of emotion rather than reason, and his influence upon the eighteenth-century Danish writer, Ludwig Holberg and the Swedish critic, Thomas Thorild, was such that it can only be described as making for romanticism. These Continental writers all seized on the more liberal aspects of Shaftesbury’s doctrines, and in this way he became an important figure in the development of the romantic movement. Shaftesbury’s ethics appealed to him because it upheld morality as part of that beauty which animates the whole universe. Nature and morality were both aspects of the same eternal beauty to which all things witness.
