Scribleriana

97 comeliness of her beauty’’ (41, 49–50). While the woman is usually interpreted as representing Jerusalem, the verses do seem particularly apropos of Yorick’s several encounters with beautiful women in the course of his journey. Geoffrey Vincent Newton University of Exeter SCRIBLERIANA Defoe criticism is a tidal wave. To assist Geoffrey Sill, we have added three more Defoe editors: Sharon Alkers (Whitman College ), Kathleen Kincade (Indiana State University), and Malinda Snow (Georgia State University). We are very pleased: they will enable us to keep current. We also welcome Deborah Rogers (University of Maine) as a Contributing Editor. Mario Curreli, our long time Advisor in Italy, is stepping down. Picking up after Paul Kirby, who was with us from our beginning, forty years ago, Mario has reviewed for us since 1985. We thank him for his writing, and we hope to carry occasional reviews from him. We are pleased to have as his successor, Flavio Gregori (Ca’ Foscari University, Venezia). We thank David Letzler, who is going to NYU to continue has graduate work, for his timely help; T. Leslie Robinson has taken over his responsibilities at Temple University. We are grateful to Whitman College for becoming a Scriblerian sponsor. A few copies of Volume 40, the preceding issue and our largest one ever (344 pages), are still available. A. C. ELIAS JR., 1944–2008 Archibald Cameron Elias Jr., distinguished student of eighteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish literature, died July 10, 2008, age sixty-three. He will be remembered as prolific of new ideas, relentlessly destructive of old biases, and among the most resourceful of scholars in discovering and interpreting documentary evidence about the literature he examined. Unfailingly correct in manner and dress, he was unconventional at core. He distrusted received wisdom and could be wickedly funny upending other people’s verities. Though assiduous in gathering and publishing factual (or at least ‘‘doumentary’’) evidence, he was skeptical about conclusions drawn from such evidence and could be severe on others for reaching facile conclusions. He most trusted those facts and conclusions that took him by surprise. In the introduction to his first major work, Swift at Moor Park (1982), he asserts that ‘‘few of us delight in proving our expectations wrong at every turn.’’ But then, with evident satisfaction, he records his experience of just such reversals. ‘‘One by one I have had to abandon [my beliefs about Swift and his work in the 1690s], and with them the clear if somewhat two-dimensional mental image of Swift which they conveyed .’’ His achievement in Swift at Moor Park was to subvert the then dominant view in Swift studies that Swift revered and emulated Sir William Temple and to substitute a portrait of a clear-eyed, pragmatic, mischievous Swift, discharging responsibilities and maintaining relationships within the Temple household in ways congruent with his own interests. The same concerns and abilities that animate Arch’s other main work, a fullscale edition of the Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (1997), also generated a series of penetrating articles that bring to life, among oth- 98 ers, Mary Barber, Patrick Delany, William Dunkin, Constantia Grierson, and Laetitia and Matthew Pilkington. Arch’s response to the members of Swift’s Irish circle was informed by his vast detailed knowledge of Anglo-Irish sources and warmed by his own humanity. Those in Swift’s circle, Arch averred, ‘‘had lives of their own, interests of their own, in most cases (I am tempted to exclude Lord Orrery) very real talents of their own. They, too, were living souls’’ (‘‘A Manuscript Book of Constantia Grierson ’s’’). The assertion is quintessential Elias: learned generosity served up with a dash of bitters. Other important titles would include ‘‘Swift’s Don Quixote, Dunkin’s Virgil Travesty, and Other New Intelligence’’ (a novella-length treatise) and the frequently cited ‘‘Senatus Consultum: Revising Verse in Swift’s Dublin Circle, 1729–1735.’’ He left unfinished an edition of Swift’s manuscript dictionary of ‘‘hard words’’ (about which he spoke at the Fourth Münster Symposium on Swift); John Fischer will ready that edition for publication. From 1981 through 1986, Arch wrote ‘‘Scribleriana Transferred,’’ a much-valued feature of this journal. The bibliographical skills and shrewdness...