62 of sea-terms’’ was fashioned for its incongruous display of outlandish idiolect, is such diligence a virtue? The same could be said of Ferret’srhetoricaltriumphasmountebank; the Jonsonian obfuscation deliberately blows sand in the reader’s face, and the thirty learned notes here are the inflation ad absurdum of academic commentary. Notes on medical and legal jargon, and research on place-names are more rewarding (the editor follows Roger Hambridge’s heroic attempt, in a 1977 PhD, to plot the novel’s itinerary, town by town), as is the commentary which is maintained on the intertextual play with Cervantes himself, Shakespeare, Fielding, Hogarth, and others. There is one note that I must take issue with. Mr. Folkenflik baldly announces, ‘‘Smollett was a slave-owner.’’This unadorned comment obscures the fact that Smollett acquired slaves with his Creole wife’s dowry, which were sold very shortly afterwards. Alongside the compendious apparatus of this text, was there no room for this mitigating circumstance? Damian Grant University of Manchester DUSTIN GRIFFIN. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. x ⫹ 316. $60. Mr. Griffin’s earlier book, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (1996), demolishes the persistent cliché that patronage died in eighteenth-century England; his Patriotism and Poetry challenges apolitical readings of British poetry after Pope and before Blake. Terms such as ‘‘the age of Sensibility’’ or ‘‘pre-Romanticism’’still label mid- to late eighteenth-century poetry and refrigerate our critical minds. Like other scholars, Mr. Griffin argues that Thomson, Akenside, Collins, Gray, Dyer, Goldsmith, Smart, Cowper, and Yearsley joined contemporary debates about British patriotismand service to the nation. For Mr. Griffin, these patriotic debates usually aroused anxiety concerning the nation’s future. Nearly constant war with France, uncertainty over Jacobite invasions, and the growing commercialization of rural England forced poets to define their own views of ‘‘true patriotism.’’ Responding to this political landscape, they drew from a range of models, including Pindar, Whitehead, Tickell, and Pope. His two opening chapters exemplify his command of British political and literary history. These presumably supply thenecessarycontextualmaterialfortheauthor-based chapters that follow, though the two parts of the book are not well integrated.Elsewhere Mr. Griffin too rarely draws connections among his poets, and thus the book seems closer to a collection of essays than a unified monograph. In part, this lack of synthesis derives from his view that trends within patriotic poetry do not exist. Nonetheless, one wishes for something more substantial than his four-page conclusion. Mr. Griffin’s best chapter is on Collins. In the Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects, he finds a fusion of political and poetic impulses. Instead of the conventional division into political and poetic works, he finds verbal echoes that link the two ‘‘groups’’ and an overarching Aristotelian principle. By de-emphasizing the topicality of his ‘‘patriotic’’ odes, Collins, in Mr. Griffin’s insightful analysis, seeks a 63 national catharsis ‘‘whereby powerful public passions can be acknowledged, aroused, contained, and ultimately soothed and softened.’’ Arousing and questioning patriotic feeling, Thomson set a model for subsequent poets. His political landscape in The Seasons describes a Britain that is powerful and pacific, rural and mercantile, virtuous and rich, insular and imperial. Notwithstanding Thomson’s complex praise for his homeland, the poet had ‘‘misgivings’’and ‘‘anxious doubts and fears’’ concerning corrupt, Walpolian Britain as well as its possible postWalpolian incarnation. Though I accept this reading of Thomson’s position, I question some of Mr. Griffin’s methods. Specifically, he challenges the view that Lyttelton drastically reduced Liberty for issues of brevity alone; rather, ‘‘it seems equally likely’’that Lyttelton wanted Thomson’s poem to reflect ‘‘an unambiguouslycongratulatorypicture of British liberty.’’ However, Mr. Griffin avoids addressing the extensive scope of Lyttelton ’s deletions and cites a small proportion of the 1450 lines that Lyttelton removed, almost 43 percent of Thomson’s poem. Further, Lyttelton retains lines critical of the Roman republic (which Mr. Griffin describes as ‘‘an unsullied model of classical liberty’’ in ‘‘Patriot ideology’’) and removes lines that unabashedly praise British independence . Mr. Griffin’s rhetorical move of ‘‘it seems equally likely’’ coupled with minimal evidence signals interpretive lapses or tentative points that recur in Patriotism and...
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Sep 3, 2013
Pablo Andrés Aguayo Westwood 
Open Access
