The correspondence of Anthony Collins (1676-1729), freethinker

Anthony Collins was cast in an unflattering light and dismissed out-of-hand by early critics who included the classical scholar Richard Bentley, the philosopher Bishop Berkeley and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His correspondence, particularly with John Locke - the most intense and seminal of his friend-ships - and Pierre Des Maizeaux - among the most protracted and certainly best documented, shows him very differently and sets the stage for a proper appreciation of the most penetrating and philosophically acute of the early 18^th century English free-thinkers.