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213 Spring 2006 Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON ROGERS, PAT. ‘‘Joseph Addison,’’ DNB. Vol 1. Oxford: Oxford, 2004. Pp. 321– 329. Addison was a writer and a politician, and his career shifted between these roles. He was a leading literary figure and a professional writer at a time when authorship was only beginning to emerge as an independent profession. Although at the end of his life he served briefly as a secretary of state, he was more a bureaucrat than a major political figure. The relationship between his politics and his writing is complex, and to come to terms with it, one needs a fairly detailed understanding of political machinations and their significance in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Mr. Rogers carefully balances the two halves of Addison’s career and supplies enough background to make sense of both. Although Mr. Rogers traces the web of connections that tied Addison to the Whig Junto and provides a clear record of the various offices he held, he does not have much to say about the substance of Addison’s politics. This paucity is par- *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. ticularly apparent in the description of Addison’s political writings. His writings on his Italian travels set forth the virtues of Whig insistence on free trade and personal liberty in contrast to the poverty and repression of the Italian states he visited, and that contrast parallels the decline of modern Italy from the values of classical, especially republican times. Mr. Rogers similarly has little to say about the politics of Addison’s Freeholder. But the middle term that connects Addison’s career as author with his career as a politician lies in his treatment of political ideas, even if unoriginal . In comparison to Leslie Stephen’s entry on Addison for the old DNB, Mr. Rogers’s discussion of Addison’s literary works, though judicious and accurate, is relatively uninformative. We are told that Addison’s manner in the Tatler ‘‘is slightly more polished and urbane’’ than Steele’s and that the Spectator is memorable for the humorous personalities of its club members and for its innovative literary criticism, but not that it depicts social manners and sermonizes on moral and religious issues. Ample information is given on Addison’s literary connec- 214 tions, on his role as a contemporary literary figure, and on his personal life. Mr. Rogers’s account of Addison weaves together the diverse strands of his life with graceful narrative skill. He avoids the hagiography of nineteenthcentury biographers such as Macaulay and the dismissive attitude of such later writers as Dobrée and Lewis. As a result, Addison emerges, properly, as a figure whose particular importance lies in his address to the political and cultural issues of his own time and in his anticipation of the concerns of future generations . Those generations are now our own distant past, and as a result, Mr. Rogers convincingly argues, Addison’s major interest is as a pleasing instance of past thought. Charles A. Knight University of Massachusetts Boston ARBUTHNOT ROSS, ANGUS. ‘‘John Arbuthnot,’’ DNB. Vol 2. Oxford: Oxford, 2004. Pp. 325– 329. Though popularly remembered as the Scotsman who invented the character ‘‘John Bull,’’ the career of Arbuthnot has inevitably been overshadowed by those of his Scriblerian associates Pope, Swift, and Gay. Arbuthnot was a polymath whose multiple roles as statistician, antiquarian , political satirist, poet, medical writer, and court physician to Queen Anne present a challenge to any biographer . G. A. Aitken’s The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot M. D. (1892 and long out of print) remains the only substantial source. Arbuthnot’s modern biographer faces other hurdles. Establishing his oeuvre presents something of a minefield, with a number of occasional satirical pamphlets attributable to him upon circumstantial evidence alone (Leslie Stephen felt the need to devote a substantial part of his original DNB entry on Arbuthnot to dismissing the many spurious attributions claimed by the anonymous editor of the two-volume Miscellaneous Works published in 1770). Famous in his own lifetime for paying scant regard to putting his name to publications, the collaborative nature of much of Arbuthnot’s output as a satirist...

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