This collection of fourteen essays is dedicated to Marjorie Hope Nicholson and is divided equally between works of her colleagues and of her former students. The papers themselves are divided as well into seven which consider a specific author or work (usually a single passage or episode in a major writer) and those which are concerned with a broader problem. Of the seven studies launched from the consideration of a specific work, three are derived from problems based on Milton. These include A.O. Lovejoy on Milton’s astronomy, M.A.N. Radzinowicz on Milton’s theory of regeneration as shown in Eve and Dalila, and A.D. Ferry on Milton’s personal involvement in the idea of “the fortunate fall” of Man. A fourth article based on Milton is William Haller’s on “The Tragedy of God’s Englishman”. The other four papers derived from specific works are M. K. Starkman on Herrick’s Noble Numbers, Ralph Cohen on eighteenth century illustrations of Thomson’s The Seasons, R.S. Crane on Gulliver’s fourth voyage, and Ernest Tuveson on Sterne’s attitude toward John Locke’s Essay. The more general papers are Douglas Bush on the Renaissance hero, J.A. Mazzeo on Cromwell as Davidic King, R.F. Jones on the humanistic defense of learning against Puritan critiques about 1650, D.L. Colie on the role of paradox in the language of the period, and G.L. Finney on the persistance in England of Galenic and Pythagorean ideas on the medical value of music.

   The volume ends with a note on the intellectual contribution of Marjorie Hope Nicolson, a bibliography of her writings, and an index to the whole volume. Although the papers are, on the whole, too specialized for the general reader, they do reassure him that the history of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has, through the teaching of Lovejoy and Nicolson, escaped the alienation into “Two Societies” which Sir C.P. Snow believes he can discern in the twentieth century.


-- Carroll Quigley

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