INTRODUCTION
Between 1710 and 1729 Anthony Collins was lampooned, satirized, and gravely denounced from pulpit and press as England’s most insidious defiler of church and state. Yet within a year of his death he became the model of a proper country gentleman,
... he had an opulent Fortune, descended to him from his Ancestors, which he left behind him unimpair’d: He lived on his own Estate in the Country, where his Tenants paid him...
more...