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1 Autumn 2001 and Spring 2002 Vol. XXXIV, Nos. 1 and 2 This issue is dedicated to Simon Varey, who died on April 4, 2002. He became an editor in 2000 and his fingers touched every page from the front cover to the oncoming five-year Bibliography and Index, both of which he improved. This issue could not have been done without him. You will see him most fully in the dozens of reviews he wrote—both articles and books. And you will come across him in the reviews; a careful editor, he believed the late Ian Hamilton, who observed: Reviews ‘‘ought to be constructed, and listened to, and they shouldn’t contain a word out of place.’’ Simon sent Hamilton’s comment to us. He also embodied what Hamilton said of them, ‘‘And there should be some rhythm in their sentences and some wit.’’ Simon gathered all of our reviews and wrote to our contributors; they too knew his playfulness. It was always fun working with him. In our editorial meetings, he had marvelous asides, suddenly saying one afternoon: ‘‘Golf! Sometimes I’m ashamed to have Scottish ancestors. Then I think of curling and want the earth to swallow me whole.’’ RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON ROSENTHAL, LAURA J. ‘‘Juba’s Roman Soul: Addison’s Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism,’’ SLI, 32 (Fall 1999), 63–76. Cato is often read in the light of political jockeying between Whigs and Tories in 1713, theyearof itsoriginalproduction .Ms.Rosenthalurgesthattheplay deserves to be seen in the broader political context of competition between nationalism and racial tensions on one hand *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. and enlightened cosmopolitanism on the other. Her vision of the play requires a radically revised understanding of both Cato and the Numidian prince Juba who courts Cato’s daughter Marcia. Rather than seeing Cato as an ideal figure of heroic fortitude , Ms. Rosenthal follows J. M. Armistead in interpreting Cato’s stubborn resistance to Caesar and his eventual suicide as impractical and perhaps selfindulgent . (O, what a falling-off was there!) With Cato’s virtues eclipsed, the 2 romance between Juba and Marcia is something more than a subplot; in fact, their honorable courtship and promised marriage define ‘‘a significant alternative ’’ to the conflict between Caesar and Cato. What significance? It depends how far one trusts the power of implication. Cato’s death marks the end of an era. Ms. Rosenthal reads the transnational and transracial marriage between Marcia and Juba, blessed by Cato before his death, as a gesture toward cosmopolitanism and a partial ‘‘answer’’ to other eighteenthcentury plays in the tradition of Othello which treated racial crossing as problematic . She argues further that Cato implies a critique and transvaluation of ‘‘Romanness ’’ into an ethical category that can be worn with pride by a wise and honorable African prince. Peter M. Briggs Bryn Mawr College WALKER, WILLIAM. ‘‘Ideology and Addison ’s Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination,’’EC Life, 24 (Spring 2000), 65–84. From Habermas through to Marxian scholars such as Terry Eagleton and Erin Mackie, it has been an article of faith that Addison’s pronouncements on the imagination (what we anachronistically call his ‘‘aesthetics’’)—and by extension the whole Augustan tradition of theorizing about beauty and taste—‘‘serve the interests and values of the middle class or bourgeoisie.’’ All these scholars, Mr. Walker argues, are simply wrong, having been seduced by now-exploded views of the early eighteenth century enshrined in works such as C. B. Macpherson’s Political TheoryofPossessiveIndividualism (1962) and the essays of Christopher Hill. Against his foes Mr. Walker marshals nearly every other economic or political historian who has written about the period . From his luminaries, he distills his counterevidence: no ‘‘bourgeoisie’’ existed in the Marxian sense in Augustan England; those engaged in commerce continued to identify with and support aristocratic, civic-humanist, gentry, or at least polite ideals; Addison’s alignments are not ‘‘middle-class’’but simply ‘‘Whig.’’(Mr. Walker is less concernedto make the case from Addison’s own writings ; he could easily have pointed outthat Addison was at pains to give Sir Andrew Freeport a lineage fully as genteel as those bestowed on Sir Roger and Mr. Spectator.) Tart refutationsofMackie...