A History of English Literature

and ends up (adventures later) prosperous and penitent. Colonel Jack’s career has a similar pattern. Less prosperous is the end ...

social situations. From this grew the idea ofPamela; or Virtue Rewarded(1740), a young servant’s account in letters and a journa ...

a stage-coach came by. The postilion hearing a man’s groans, stopped his horses, and told the coachman, ‘he was certain there wa ...

that ‘to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history’. Allworthy and Sophia accept Tom’s war ...

of clock-winding and procreation is presented as an instance of Locke’s theory of sense-impressions.Instead of G–d’s ‘Let there ...

where Uncle Toby got the wound in his groin has nothing to do with the topogra- phy of Marlborough’s campaigns. Much earlier, To ...

Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray, Etonians of the next decade, entirely lacked Fielding’s moral robustness; they preferred the art ...

stunk and littered in St. Paul’s.’ To his Augustan word-play and polish, Gray joined the proto-Romantic tastes shown in his lett ...

Mason, but his sublime meaning was so misunderstood that he had to provide notes. Gray later translated from The Goddodin, a Wel ...

Coldly correct, to Shakespeare’s Warblings wild?’ asked Joseph Warton in The Enthusiast: or, The Lover of Nature (1744). Joseph ...

In 1726 James Thomson had called for a revival of the sublime in poetry, which had inspired mankind ‘from Moses down to Milton’. ...

this helmet, which is able to wave its plume. Enlightened readers did not suppose that such events took place even in Latin lati ...

giving house-room to many unfortunates, though he did not object to dining out. He had a deep Christian faith. He told an Anglic ...

The Dictionary Memory and composition were then central to education. Yet Johnson’s mental strength and acute verbal sense were ...

called upon me to range this accumulation of elegance and wisdom into an alphabetical series, I soon discovered that the bulk of ...

Johnson takes a gloomy pleasure in exposing the falsity of hopes he once had shared. There is an almost tragic satisfaction in t ...

Literary criticism Johnson’s moral essays and Rasselas have long been admired, and his prayers and meditations can move atheists ...

James Boswell (1740–1795), the son of a lowland Law Lord, made a Grand Tour. When in Switzerland he charmed both Voltaire and Ro ...

character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated ...

finished work is as overwhelming as the Palace of Versailles when occupied, although his manner is sometimes of the kind which l ...