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ADDISON

Mueller, Andreas K. E. "Politics, Politeness, and Panegyric: Defoe, Addison, and Philips on Blenheim," PQ, 94.1–2 (2015), 121–147.

Appearing within a few weeks of one another, Addison's Campaign and Philips's Blenheim celebrated the Duke of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim a few months earlier. The two poems, both ministerial propaganda, one from a Whig and one from a Tory point of view, are by consensus the two most admired, important, and lasting—and perhaps only two worthwhile—poems to emerge out of that battle. Yet more than forty Marlborough panegyrics appeared within a year of the victory, and if we read the two famous poems against this background, including those that are "downright tedious" from an aesthetic perspective, we are reminded of what we (should) already know, that "the political landscape of early eighteenth-century [End Page 2] Britain was significantly more complex than a simple Tory-Whig division."

Defoe's A Hymn to Victory "offers a clearer endorsement of the government's moderate stance" and thereby "complicates our understanding of the way in which the politics of the moment colored poetic responses to Marlborough's victory"; thus it encourages us to rethink eighteenth-century notions of politeness. Defoe's poem makes an argument for a "precommercial" conception of virtue and politeness. Unlikely to promote widespread reading of the "tedious" Blenheim poems, Mr. Mueller adds a third poem to what had become an exemplary binary pair; he usefully discourages simplistic binary thinking.

ARBUTHNOT

Keithley, Walter H. "Learning from Don Bilioso's Adventures: Visualizing a Critical Edition of the Printed Works of John Arbuthnot," Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr., ed. Jesse G. Swan. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. 33–44.

This starts from an unassailable premise: John Arbuthnot, "one of the most under-studied figures of the British eighteenth century," deserves a proper scholarly edition of his printed works. Arbuthnot has been unfairly neglected because his reputation among his contemporaries was based more on "sentimental praise" than "rigorous scholarly appraisals of his life and work" (both of which merit our attention). Arbuthnot has also suffered from "a poorly defined canon" and a large number of doubtful works that have been attributed to him. This problem arose in the eighteenth century: the majority of the texts included in the 1739 and 1751 collections of his works have since been discredited and deattributed.

At this point, Mr. Keithley enters murkier waters, although not entirely of his own making. George Aitken's 1892 biography of Arbuthnot was the first attempt at "a serious intellectual biography" of the author, but it effectively conferred the "status of sub-canonical" on a range of works which are, nevertheless, "legitimate candidates for canonical inclusion" in any future critical edition. It is fair to say that these questionable works may be relevant to the understanding of both "Arbuthnot's canon and intellectual contexts," but it is more difficult to agree with Mr. Keithley's assertion of this "continuing necessity of integrating both canon and sub-canon in a critical edition."

His discussion of The Life and Adventures of Don Bilioso de l'Estomac (1719), part of a minor pamphlet war involving Dr. John Woodward over the causes of smallpox, is interesting enough—and it does flesh out the context of medical controversies in the early years of the eighteenth century. But there is nevertheless "no evidence that Arbuthnot was ever interested in the small pox war, and no proof that any pamphlets spawned by the skirmish were ever ascribed to him prior to 1750." Don Bilioso may have some affinities with the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, but then so do many ephemeral works of the period. Would it not be better to discuss works of uncertain authorship like this in secondary commentary, but not include them in their entirety in...

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