Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison’s Latin Poetry by Estelle Haan (review)

73 Swift’s animus against his cousin Dryden , contending that Swift was galled by Dryden’s working ‘‘both sides of the fence’’ in the quarrel between ancients and moderns. There are more plausible explanations for Swift’s dislike. A defender of the Test Acts (which excluded from public employment, until 1827, those who would not take Anglican communion before witnesses and abjure transubstantiation ), he had to be offended at Dryden’s all-out attack on the Test Act in The Hind and the Panther. Dryden agreed with James II that religious and civil liberties for all, including Dissenters and atheists, was the way to ensure peace. Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY ESTELLE HAAN. Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison’s Latin Poetry . Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005. Pp. xiv ⫹ 210. $24. Ms. Haan is arguably the foremost authority on Neo-Latin poetry composed by English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—such as Milton, Marvell, and Gray. In Vergilius Redivivus , Ms. Haan focuses on Addison’s Latin verse, which consists of six poems that he contributed to Oxford University anthologies from 1689 to 1697, along with a group of Latin epigrams on the Vigo expedition of 1702. Though readers may regard these compositions as ingenious academic exercises, Ms. Haan sees them as richly rewarding works. Closely examining their texts and contexts, she demonstrates the intrinsic merits of these poems, largely ignored by modern readers , as well as their importance to late seventeenth-century literary culture. Addison wrote wittily and engagingly about barometers, puppet theater, and bowling, and his keen sense of contemporaneity was filtered through the lenses of classical antiquity. Thanks to these poems, Addison became known as an accomplished classicist and a talented man of letters. His fluency in Latin was as much a matter of ‘‘vibrant’’ oral performance as it was of technical expertise. In her Introduction, Ms. Haan explains the competitive nature of these university anthologies and shows how Addison, by surpassing his peers, earned social prominence and political patronage. Devoting a chapter to each of the six poems, she provides fascinating commentary on popular sports, the new science, pygmies and other ‘‘miniature’’ phenomena, puppet shows, and the master puppeteer of the age, Thomas Powell. Her chapter on ekphrastic poetry gathers important new material on an influential artist of the time, Isaac Fuller, whose Michaelangelesque mural once graced the chapel walls of Magdalene College. A recurring theme is the subtle and daring way in which Addison reimagines Virgil through a network of Virgilian allusions and Virgilian subtexts , hence her title Vergilius Redivivus. Equally valuable are the Appendices which offer the complete Latin texts together with facing English translations, in addition to Addison’s translation of Virgil’s Fourth Georgic and his Essay on Virgil’s Georgics. Every university library should have this book. Taylor Corse Arizona State University LISA HILTON. Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005. Pp. xix ⫹ 204. £18.99. As Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera, Lavinia Fenton was a huge success and was celebrated in Hogarth’s famous painting of a scene in the play. She soon became the mistress of the rich ...