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422 LEITERS IN CANADA '999 careful, methodical approach to battle. Sheaffe, after all, is the man who rallied dispirited British forces at Queenston Heights to victory after Brock's death. Isaac Brock, however, is the man who dominates Turner's book and modem memories of the war. After all, Brock's valiant death is commemorated by a towering obelisk on Queenston Heights, and his bloodstained tunic resides in the neglected halls of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Brock's bravery and skill in the early months of the War of 1812 are not in doubt, but Turner rightly deflates much of the overblown myth that surrounds the dead general. Brock foolishly put himself in jeopardy at Queenston Heights by leading his men into combat, and he paid for that error when an American sharpshooter put a bullet in his chest. Furthermore , Turner ranks Brock only above Rottenburg in terms of civiladministrative skill, and argues that Brock's battlefield exploits can be explained, in part, because the Americans were poorly prepared to fight and because American commanders like William Hull and Stephen Van Rensselaer were incompetent. Moreover, Turner asserts that Brock and Sheaffe truly influenced the course of the war by stopping the American invasions of Upper Canada in 1812. One wonders, though, how well Brock's reputation would have fared had he survived his fatal rendezvous with that American soldier at Queenston Heights and lost some battles of his own. Maybe Hollywood agents are correct; sometimes dying can be a good career move. (GALEN ROGER PERRAS) Donald S. Hair. Robert Browning's Lnnguage UniverSity of Toronto Press. X, 326. $55.00 Donald Hair's second book on Robert Browning expands his earlier focus on experiments with genre to Browning's distinctive language. Robert Browning's Language progresses in a Fra Lippo-like bipedal manner in that it is composed of twining theses about Browning's understanding of language and its influence on his poetics. Browning's language, not language itself, is his subject, and Hair draws the insight he brings to bear on Browning's poetry from the precision ofhis focus on Browning's sources and influences. Hair figures Browning's understanding of language as the confluence of two contexts. The first has its source in the language theory of John Locke as reflected in Johnson's Dictionary. Browning inherited an insistence on language as a human construct which connects an utterance to an idea ('those generalizations from experience which make up our knowledge') or a number of ideas which 'the mind chooses' and '''ties ... together by a Name." , The element of choice is paramount: 'Locke makes the point that such naming is a choice made by the mind, reflecting human concerns and HUMANITIES 42} serving human purposes.' 50 understood, language not only requires interpretation, it reflects a history of previous interpretations - which is where Johnson ascends. Johnson organizes a word's definitions from initial 'primitiveness' (closest to their ground in the world of sense) through increasing complexity as a conditional map of the word's history and the paths of its equivocations. For Browning, this map emphasizes how every act of speech incarnates the mind of the speaker, and the mind is intimate with soul, as Hair also demonstrates,in Browning's conception. 'Language, in short, is the outering of the inner life - that is its essential nature - and to study human psychology Browning needed only to start with the study of the dictionary.' From the second stream, the Puritan tradition of his family's Congregationalist church, Browning inherited a sense that the equivocations of language represent the depravity of human understanding in a fallen world, but also that language is 'the means of our hard-fought return to God.' The transition point between the two takes conversion as its model. Requiring interpretation, judgment, language offers endless opportunities for an individual to exercise these faculties, which were central to Browning 's understanding of Christian salvation. Pauline, as its subtitle attests, is the first of many poems where Browning's conception of language leads to a poetry more accurately 'confessional' by this definition than were his initial 5helleyan impulses. Hair builds on this foundation in a manner that recalls...

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