Cup-bearers of wine and hellebore

These essays have already appeared in one or the other of the following publications: The New York Times, The Dial, The Freeman and are printed here with the kind permission of...

Throughout what we may call the militant years of Jonathan Swift’s life, Stella was not the only young girl who, in the words of Dr. Johnson “from being proud of his praise grew...

And so we come to that long period of Cowper’s life which is so familiar to the literary world--the period when the strange, obsessed poet diverted himself “under the point of a...

As the years passed, James Thomson’s melancholy grew deeper and deeper. Dejected, poverty-stricken, unrecognized, he still tramped the streets, and still from his bed in his lod...