Sir William Temple Research Articles

Sir William Temple, “the Hume of the Seventeenth Century”

Sir William Temple, “the Hume of the Seventeenth Century”

The Exotic Country in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns: Images of China in the Battle of the Books

Preceded by Renaissance, followed by Enlightenment, the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, as an important cultural and intellectual event in European minds, has not received the attention it deserves. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns which happened in 1690s England, also known as the Battle of the Books. In the battle about the superiority of ancient culture or modern culture in the West, China as an exotic country of the East was repeatedly mentioned, and in the polemical writings between Sir William Temple and William Wotton, China was given two entirely different faces: "Politically Prominent China" and "Pagan China". By analyzing the state of Chinese knowledge and the mechanism of image production in the polemical writings of British intellectuals, this paper discusses the role and ideological function played by the image of China in Enlightenment Britain, and then deliberates the construction of the British state, religious consciousness, and reflexive subject in the Early Modern period.

Swift’s War and Peace

Abstract This article considers some of the military and diplomatic contexts which have been neglected in the study of eighteenth-century mock-heroic literature, with a particular focus on the early satires of Swift. Typically, mock-heroic literature is seen as a skilful exercise in a particular kind of literary style, and individual mock-heroic satires are usually contextualized by setting them alongside the military epics (e.g., the Iliad or Aeneid) which they seem to parody. This article takes a slightly different approach by setting Swift’s mock-heroic satires against the background of the Grand Alliance wars against Louis XIV (1688–1714), and by taking another look at his relationship with the retired diplomat and ambassador Sir William Temple. As will be discussed, Temple’s essay ‘Of Heroic Virtue’ offered Swift a model of civil heroism which could be defended or advocated in satire, and it is the influence on Swift of the period’s diplomatic, political, and legal writings which will occupy the core of this discussion.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Rumbold,Valerie. Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765

Rumbold,Valerie. <i>Swift in Print: Published Texts in Dublin and London, 1691– 1765</i>

Publishing Perils and Friendships

Publishing Perils and Friendships

Gardens of happiness:

ABSTRACT Sir William Temple, an English statesman and humanist, wrote “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” in 1685, taking a neo-Epicurean approach to happiness and temperance. In accord with Pierre Gassendi’s Epicureanism, “happiness” is characterised as freedom from disturbance and pain in mind and body, whereas “temperance” means following nature (Providence and one’s physio-psychological constitution). For Temple, cultivating fruit trees in his garden was analogous to the threefold cultivation of temperance as a virtue in the humoral body (as food), the mind (as freedom from the passions), and the body-economic (as circulating goods) in order to attain happiness. A regimen that was supposed to cure the malaise of the Restoration amidst a crisis of unbridled passions, this threefold cultivation of temperance underlines Temple’s reception of China and Confucianism wherein happiness and temperance are highlighted. Thus Temple’s “gardens of happiness” represent not only a reinterpretation of classical ideas, but also his dialogue with China.

China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min

Reviewed by: China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min Yu Liu Eun Kyung Min. China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2018. Pp. xii + 277. $99.99. Erudite and excellently written, Min's book casts a valuable and at times even uniquely revealing light on the once pervasive but today too often overlooked presence of China in the evolution of modern English taste, gender politics, literary identity, and commercial and consumer culture. Her remarkable success, however, also exposes a regrettable limitation. The problem is her conceptual framework, shared with quite a few other recent scholars, which confines her study to English representations or misrepresentations of China rather than opening it to the more interesting and more important aspect of the early-modern cross-cultural encounter that involved the transmission and reception of actual Chinese ideas. As Min points out in her introduction, the very concept of modernity implies an awareness of something not modern or premodern, or a self-conscious contrast of past and present, us and them, and more. Beginning with the English battle of the books in the 1690s, she persuasively shows the historical English literary self-consciousness as growing in a global context, particularly in relation to China. Sir William Temple's well-known admiration of China, for instance, complicated his defense of the ancients against the moderns and made him a surprising initiator of various changes later associated with English literary modernity. Moving the restless adventures of Crusoe from the Caribbean Islands to the Far East, Defoe effectively wrote China into the new prose narrative of formal realism that he helped to invent while highlighting the same point as had been made by William Wotton in his earlier dispute with Temple that China as an ancient rival to modern England and Europe had to be confronted. Taking cues from Temple's discussion of the irregular Chinese garden layout, Addison developed in The Spectator his enormously influential aesthetics of the new, the uncommon, and the strange. Though already contested in the mid eighteenth century, China's immense prestige still enticed Goldsmith to impersonate a resident Chinese scholar in London and to satirize the social, [End Page 227] political, and consumer culture of England from the serial vantage point of a wellregarded foreign correspondent or "Citizen of the World" (1760–1761). Riding the same widespread interest in China, Thomas Percy used a Chinese love story, The Pleasing History (1761), to serve his ulterior agenda of locating English literary antiquity in the Gothic or Germanic oral tradition and martial history. In her account of these authors, Min considerably enriches our understanding through a conceptual framework that focuses close attention on English representations or misrepresentations of China. What makes possible her accomplishment, however, also severely limits her success. Her book, as she writes in her introduction, is "geared toward China's influence on English literary history and form," but precisely this objective in a strict sense is not achieved, because she rarely checks English ideas of China against any reality in that country. The Chinese irregular gardening style, for instance, is inextricably linked with the longstanding Chinese sense of a deep affinity between humanity and heaven (tianren heyi), which inspired not only the use of art to imitate or follow nature in landscaping but also similar efforts in cosmological thinking, ethical deliberation, medicine, and political theory. Min rightly recognizes the English discussion of Chinese landscaping as important. However, without any reference to Chinese reality, she is simply unable to make clear how Temple's understanding was insightful and may have influenced decisively his thoughts about government, ethics, health, and poetic creativity. Similarly, she fails to point out how Addison's echo of Temple played an important propagandic role in English garden design reform but his pet project of the new, the uncommon, and the strange had little to do with China. Much of the information about Chinese landscaping in the first half of the eighteenth century was about Chinese imperial garden complexes such as Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Brilliant Brightness) in Beijing and Bishu Shanzhuang (Mountain Resort for Escaping the Summer Heat) in Chengde, built...

Swift after Cowley

Swift after Cowley Daniel Cook Abraham Cowley advocated an exhilarating combination of boldness and originality that resounded throughout Restoration poetry: “We break up Tombs with Sacrilegious Hands, / Old Rubbish we remove,” he writes, “Whilst still the Liberal Earth does hold / So many Virgin Mines of undiscover’d Gold” (“To Mr Hobs”).1 In fact, Howard D. Weinbrot has singled out the appearance of Cowley’s Pindarics in 1656 as the instigator of “perhaps the most important revolution in British poetic form.”2 Peter J. Schakel surmises that Cowley’s high seriousness in particular appealed to many fledgling writers in the mid-seventeenth century.3 Venturing into verse sometime later, in the early 1690s, the young satirist Jonathan Swift might seem to be an unlikely student of Cowley, though. (The latter had died in the summer of 1667, almost three months before Swift was even born; that said, Cowley’s collected works continued to be reissued well into the next century.) After all, as Noelle Dückmann Gallagher recently observed, panegyrics “are not simply embarrassing to us now; they have been embarrassing readers for more than three centuries.”4 But two of Swift’s earliest poems, “Ode to the King” and “Ode to the Athenian Society,” were explicitly modeled on “Ode. Upon His Majesty’s Restoration and Return” and “To the Royal Society,” respectively, as well as a handful of other works.5 As Swift himself recognized at the time, “I find when I writt what pleases me I am Cowley to my self and can read it a hundred times over.”6 And two other early odes, “Ode to Sancroft” and “Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple,” are broadly Cowleyan; he switched to heroic couplets in “To Mr Congreve” and “Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery.” Soon after, he found the conversational mode that became his vehicle of choice for occasional and personal verse alike. David Sheehan has compellingly argued that, in spite of outward appearances, Swift’s early odes reveal an early satiric impulse much more readily than a panegyric one, in an influential reading that [End Page 37] preempts Gallagher’s more recent account of the panegyric at large insofar as it attempts to salvage Swift from what the latter calls the “unfashionable genre.”7 The satiric impulse is undeniable: it is hardwired into Swift’s substantial body of verse and prose. But such a generalization takes us only so far toward understanding what he was doing with the Cowleyan ode at the outset of his career as a poet. If we read Swift’s early odes as ironic we might be inclined to view his long-term poetics as remarkably consistent in scope if not in kind. That is, his turn to the conversational mode would mark a change in format rather than impulse—an impulse that remains satiric, sardonic, and perhaps derisory. If we read the early poems as sincere, however, it stands to reason that Swift should be judged as a failed odist writing at the end of an extravagant panegyrical tradition that would soon be emphatically demolished by Matthew Prior and other political poets.8 I want to suggest a third way: Swift was not mocking the Restoration ode so much as he was exposing its inappropriateness for modern poetry through a staged crisis of the fictive poet figure. After all, a poet can be simultaneously satirical and sincere; poetry can be taken ironically or earnestly. An attentive reader of Cowley and other Restoration odists, Swift does not uniformly parody their works, though he does travesty specific phrases and motifs. Invading their materials, he returns with self-reflexive commentaries on his own suitableness for post-Restoration panegyrics. Notionally tracing over the Cowleyan ode in “Ode to the King” and “Ode to the Athenian Society,” Swift provides paper-thin palimpsests of shifting trends in seventeenth-century poetry and his own position within them. How useful a model was Cowley by this stage? What is an odist to do without an obvious hero or villain as their subject? Who appoints an odist, anyway? What sort of poet did Swift want to be in his early twenties? The fledgling poet’s earliest...

China in the Radical Enlightenment Context of the English Battle of the Books

Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment revives a significant intellectual connection between the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) and the English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple (1628–1699). Their connection had several strands but centered on a shared, even credulous, enthusiasm for China, which Jesuit missionaries were introducing to Europe's intellectual class with accelerating detail and sophistication from the mid-seventeenth century on. Vossius was at the vanguard of those turning the reports from China into challenges to a range of orthodox positions, and Temple followed and in a sense outdistanced Vossius by arguing that the Chinese had realized utopia "without temples, idols, or priests." This essay shows that a group of self-consciously Newtonian Anglicans made the heterodoxy being advanced with evidence from China a central reason for initiating the battle with Temple, and that, regardless of the war's other, perhaps safer, fields, charges of religious heterodoxy remained near the center of the Newtonians' understanding of the Ancients v. Moderns Controversy, even beyond Jonathan Swift's satiric send-up.

Swift and History: Politics and the English Past. Ashley Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x+282.

Marshall is equally attentive to other Swift scholars. One instance of this is when she reappraises Swift’s abandoned historical project, “Reigns” (written ca. 1700; published 1768), which was spurred by Sir William Temple’s An Introduction to the History of England (1694), but which “reflect[s] an authoritarian impulse too easily obscured by defining Swift’s work as a continuation of Temple’s Introduction” (71). Here she revises influential versions of the Temple-Swift relationship, taking A. C. Elias and Irvin Ehrenpreis to task for their “partly imaginary” versions of it: Swift “made relatively few remarks on his erstwhile patron in later years, which taken together suggest neither bitter traumatization nor veneration” (54). Convincingly dissolving “largely chimerical” biographical assumptions, and finding the idea of Sir William’s influence “at best a distraction” (from her own topic, at least), Marshall models probing, thorough, confident scholarship (55).

Unfinished family business. Algernon Sidney’s arguments with Henry Hammond, Sir William Temple, Henry Sidney, Charles II, and the public executioner

ABSTRACTRecent work about the life and thought of the republican Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) has emphasised the formative importance of the history, intellectual culture and personal matrix of the Sidney family. This essay underlines the richness of that context by casting new light on a series of key, previously undiscussed themes. These include Sidney’s lifelong relationship with the diplomat Sir William Temple and his family; the origin of his pioneering contribution to restoration resistance theory in an argument with Henry Hammond, one-time rector at Penshurst Place; the extent to which the European diplomatic contest which helped determine England’s political direction between 1679 and 1689 may be understood as a squabble between siblings; and the domestic and family circumstances attending Algernon’s arrest and execution for treason in 1683.

New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller

Reviewed by: New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller Clive Probyn New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today, ed. Patrick Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Pp. 327. $78.95. There are eighteen essays in this handsome, scrupulously edited, and well-produced collection, not counting a brief prefatory address from Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, the twelfth Earl of Shaftesbury. All originate from a three-day conference on the third Earl held in Nuremberg in August/September 2012, the purpose of which was to report on the latest research into the Earl’s life, work, and intellectual context. The underlying aim of both the conference and the collection of published papers was to present a broad spectrum of interpretation reflecting the European cosmopolitanism of their subject. Established [End Page 175] scholarship includes that of the editor, whose premise is that “Reading Shaftesbury is difficult” (no argument there, one might suggest), Michael B. Gill (on top form with an essay on Politeness, Honesty, and Virtue, with a glance at Diogenes and the ethics of public copulation), Lawrence E. Klein (with a stately reading of Shaftesbury’s readers in the eighteenth century), and Isabella Woldt, whose notable recruitment of neuroscience in a discussion of Shaftesbury’s concept of Freedom and “Compatibilism” is one of several novel approaches in the collection. A smaller group of essays takes up Shaftesbury’s views and capacity as a theoretical and practical gardener, and the standout contribution here is Suzannah Fleming’s study of the estates at St. Giles and Little Chelsea, basing her aesthetic arguments firmly on contemporary estate maps and household accounts. Sir William Temple’s interest in sharawadgi and Shaftesbury’s interest in the aesthetics of irregularity bring the East to the West in Yu Liu’s graceful, Confucian essay on the latter’s “Passion for Wild Nature”; in China “gardeners never lined things up into any geometrical shape or symmetrical order, but not because they were lazy or unskilled (as some Jesuit missionaries to China once thought).” Shaftesbury admired the skilled artisan without feeling that he should become one. His horticultural theorizing (and perhaps also his asthma) excluded him from picking up a spade himself. Similarly, his deep fascination for ideas of freedom—for those rich, educated, and socially responsible enough to understand it and be trusted with its exploration—sits perfectly alongside the patrician’s iron control over the vulgar business of printing and publishing his own work. James Pratt’s study of Shaftesbury’s collaboration with Simon Gribelin, the engraver and codesigner of the plates in Characteristicks (1714/15), not only raises the artistic profile of a man to whom Shaftesbury condescended as a mere “engine” or “instrument” of his own higher purposes but also tells us that Pope’s November 2, 1716, instructions to Gribelin relate not, as George Sherburn suggested, to the second edition of Dryden’s translation of du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting but to Pope’s own Works, published on June 3, 1717. It is good to see a skilled artisan emerging from the shadows. The central enigma for the modern reader of Shaftesbury is his challenging, sometimes irritating, often baffling combination of the formal procedures of philosophy and the “freedoms” of oblique literary suggestion, putting stress on traditional relationships between content and style, statement and tone, logic and allusiveness. For readers chiefly interested in Shaftesbury’s philosophical regimen, Andrea Gatti tells us to think of Shaftesbury as a pedagogue at odds with the temper of the age. She argues that Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism is “often a mere mask meant to cover his Stoic convictions,” a device to sweeten the pill of his message about Stoic rigor and discipline at a time when post-Restoration England was in no mood for self-denial. Laurent Jaffro similarly indicates how and why Shaftesbury uses stories, fables, and tales in The Characteristicks and Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author: read them not as literary asides but as essential, enabling procedures that liberate thinking from traditional formal method (on the will, self-control, necessity, and freedom). But there is again a caveat. In a private letter to one of...

The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason

Reviewed by: The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason Kathryn R. King Laura E. Thomason. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. ix + 205. $80. The critic who undertakes to write on the risks and dangers to women of marriage in the eighteenth century is challenged to cut a new path through trampled terrain. The topic obsessed men and women throughout the eighteenth century and has attracted near obsessive attention since Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977). Find her own way, however, Ms. Thomason does. She devotes a chapter each to six mostly upper-class women whom she dubs “marital revisionists”: Dorothy Osborne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Chapone, Mary Delany, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood (the latter an odd figure in this company). She concentrates on rhetorical analysis of their correspondence (real-life and fictional) and favors texts more likely to be passed over elsewhere. We get a detailed treatment of Scott’s 1772 novel The Test of Filial Duty, for example, not Millenium Hall; Haywood’s late conduct manuals, not Betsy Thoughtless. This study, then, directs attention to relatively underdiscussed texts. Another merit is that it draws on the increasingly sophisticated understandings of the familiar letter as a genre (or almost-genre) developed by scholars in recent years in such works as Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006). Ms. Thomason is especially [End Page 96] attentive to the way letter-writing allowed for female verbal agency and self-fashioning. She takes as a starting point the notion that in a “letter a woman could not only create a specific version of herself but also dictate the terms of her relationship with her correspondent,” an approach especially productive with respect to the actual familiar letters written by Osborne, Montagu, Chapone, and Delany, and mimicked in Thomason’s analysis by professional writers, such as Scott and Haywood. Despite all the talk, then and now, about the oppressive centrality of marriage in women’s lives and the author’s own repeated insistence on women’s “near-mandatory participation in a restrictive marriage system,” it is wonderful to confront the actual variety of living arrangements devised by genteel women, sometimes within and sometimes on the outermost edges of matrimony. Matrimony in the eighteenth century emerges here as surprisingly plastic. Delany remarried for love at forty-three after an extended, self-chosen, and happy widowhood; Montagu contrived to enjoy an extended and apparently amicable long-distance marriage that accommodated her passion for travel and a bisexual Venetian object of desire; Osborne arguably took the lead in the epistolary courtship of her future husband, Sir William Temple; after the shadowy Mr. Haywood vanished, Eliza Haywood remained single by choice (or so we surmise) for the latter decades of her life, thriving as a professional writer who may have lived companionably with a male working partner. The possibilities for women to reinvent themselves and their matrimonial arrangements were greater than is sometimes imagined, at least for linguistically adept women comfortably positioned on the social scale. The study convincingly demonstrates that women drew on the rhetorical power of the familiar letter not only to reduce the risks of matrimonial entrapment but also, more intriguingly, to nudge their own conjugal relationships in the direction of what today we would call egalitarian friendships. Love and desire were considered highly suspect in the middle to upper reaches of social life, we are usefully reminded. Even women disinclined to model themselves on conduct-book ideals were skeptical of the power of love to bring happiness, never mind the tendency of the romances and novels that supposedly shaped their emotional lives. The new ideal among thoughtful women, in Ms. Thomason’s telling of the story, was something more complicated and elusive: marriage based not so much on love as on a cross-gender friendship that entailed rational companionship, shared interests, and, less persuasively, “gender equality.” The anachronism of a “fundamentally egalitarian” matrimonial union notwithstanding, the discussion certainly makes good on the claim that “the so-called rise of companionacy was not as smooth as scholars of...

Therapies for Melancholy and Inordinate Passion in the Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–1654)

Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, written during the period of the secret, protracted courtship between the pair, demonstrate a persistent interest in melancholy and in the regulation of inordinate passion. Osborne draws on a variety of discourses of melancholy to construct herself and Temple as melancholy lovers. She also uses her letters to express and regulate her passions associated with the uncertainty of the couple’s future. This essay argues that Osborne privileges literary therapies for inordinate passion, employing affective, therapeutic processes of reading and writing within the letters themselves.

Mandeville on Governability

This paper discusses Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) conception of governability. It grounds his key distinction between a submissive and a governable subject in terms of his alternative account of human sociability to demonstrate the nature and structure of relationships that are necessary for upholding stable and flourishing societies. Using Sir William Temple as an interlocutor (1628–1699), it also explores the role played by the cultivation of reverence to authority in Mandeville's analysis of governability.

Digital Editing and the Eighteenth-Century Text: Works, Archives, and Miscellanies

This article develops recent work by literary historians on miscellany publication, and on the printed miscellanies that were so important and popular for the early eighteenth-century book trade. It offers a history of the form, illustrated by comments made by the Duke of Buckingham, Francis Osborne, Sir William Temple, Charles de Sainte-Évremond, John Locke, John Wilson, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay. It examines examples of miscellanies produced by John Dryden and his publisher Jacob Tonson, by John Dennis and Charles Gildon, and by Pope and Swift. Previous commentators have argued that miscellanies were the product of book-trade contingency—publishers simply bundled whatever fugitive poetry they happened to have to hand. This article argues that miscellanies were in fact well-theorized vehicles for authorial and editorial intention. Multiauthor miscellanies often represented complicated patterns of social and cultural allegiance. Miscellaneity had distinct formal meaning. This essay proposes that editors and designers of electronic editions should consider “digital miscellaneity” as an eligible model for future editions of eighteenth-century texts.

Tapping into a Different Cultural Tradition: Sir William Temple's Aesthetic Innovations

Studies of Sir William Temple usually associate him with the English Battle of the Books. Since his defense of the old against the new in European arts and sciences was known even in his day to be inadequate, his role in the literary history of England has so far been largely trivialized. Challenging this conventional reading, this essay strives to show that the innovation and significance of Temple's aesthetics was closely connected with his somewhat known—but hitherto insufficiently scrutinized—longstanding interest in the cultural tradition of the Far East.

From "Disorientalism: Asiam Subversions, Irish Visions"

Previous articleNext article No AccessFrom "Disorientalism: Asiam Subversions, Irish Visions"Ciaran MurrayCiaran Murray Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 2Spring 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043599 Views: 5Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Swift's First Poem: “Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple”

Stephen Karian argues that Swift's Ode to Temple, currently dated to 1692 or 1693, should be dated to 1690, which would make it Swift's earliest known piece of writing. The article demonstrates the correct dating from external evidence and analyzes Swift's later poem occasioned by Temple's illness and recovery. The two Temple poems bracket Swift's early career as a poet.