 Beauty is at the center of Shaftesbury’s aesthetics. Shaftesbury discusses the beauty of literature, music, and painting. He takes the primary instances of physical beauty to be features of the natural world. Shaftesbury’s characters in The Moralists dismiss the beauty of gardens, arguing for the superiority of naturalness or wildness over the artifice and “formal Mockery of princely Gardens” (C 2.393–4). But Shaftesbury himself was a great lover of gardens, and the gardens he himself planned were more formal than they were wild or natural. For fascinating discussions of Shaftesbury’s views of gardening and their influences, see Leatherbarrow (1984), Liu (2008), Fleming (2014), and Myers (2010 and 2017).