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Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks
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Edward Wortley Montagu
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This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Introduction, editorial additions, and index © 2015 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
Frontispiece: Portrait of Edward Wortley Montagu by Matthew William Peters, oil on canvas, 1775. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
This eBook edition published in 2019.
eBook ISBNs:
978-1-61487-268-9
978-1-61487-644-1
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CONTENTS
The Thomas Hollis Library, by David Womersley
Introduction, by David Womersley
Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks
4. Of the Republick of Carthage
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6. Of the Real Cause of the Rapid Declension of the Roman Republick
7. Carthaginians and Romans Compared
8. Of Revolution in Mixed Governments
9. Of the British Constitution
A. The French Translation of Montagu’s Reflections
B. Extracts from Reviews of the First Edition of Montagu’s Reflections
C. Thomas Hollis’s Copy of Montagu’s Reflections
D. Emendations to the Copy Text
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Thomas Hollis (1720–74) was an eighteenth-century Englishman who devoted his energies, his fortune, and his life to the cause of liberty. Hollis was trained for a business career, but a series of inheritances allowed him to pursue instead a career of public service. He believed that citizenship demanded activity and that it was incumbent on citizens to put themselves in a position, by reflection and reading, in which they could hold their governments to account. To that end for many years Hollis distributed books that he believed explained the nature of liberty and revealed how liberty might best be defended and promoted.
A particular beneficiary of Hollis’s generosity was Harvard College. In the years preceding the Declaration of Independence, Hollis was assiduous in sending to America boxes of books, many of which he had had specially printed and bound, to encourage the colonists in their struggle against Great Britain. At the same time he took pains to explain the colonists’ grievances and concerns to his fellow Englishmen.
The Thomas Hollis Library makes freshly available a selection of titles that, because of their intellectual power, or the influence they exerted on the public life of their own time, or the distinctiveness of their approach to the topic of liberty, comprise the cream of the books distributed by Hollis. Many of these works have been either out of print since the eighteenth
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century or available only in very expensive and scarce editions. The highest standards of scholarship and production ensure that these classic texts can be as salutary and influential today as they were two hundred and fifty years ago.
David Womersley
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Edward Wortley Montagu (1713–76) was the son of an exceptionally wealthy father and a celebrated and talented mother. Edward Wortley Montagu senior (1678–1761)—Member of Parliament (MP), diplomat, and man of business—eloped on 23 August 1712 with Lady Mary Pierrepoint (1689–1762), later to achieve fame under her married name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as at first the friend and then the foe of Alexander Pope, as a pioneer of inoculation for smallpox, and as an Oriental traveler. Almost nine months to the day after the elopement, on 16 May 1713 Lady Mary gave birth to a son.1
After an infancy passed in Constantinople, where his father had been posted as British ambassador, a period