“All Lingua’s are to thee Vernaculus”: The Bilingualism of Horatian Imitation in Early Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture

In this essay, Sara Hale examines evidence of bilingualism in a cluster of Latin epistolary odes composed by English authors and the responses to them in both Latin and English. Such a study sheds light on the social and interactive nature of eighteenth-century literature and extends the force of contemporary epistolarity to include extended correspondence between languages. This is important not only for the study of Horatian reception but also for a full understanding of the manuscript and literary culture of the period in Britain, in which Latin poetry played a prominent role. An appendix presents editions of three of the poems.