This chapter addresses the question of Johnson’s ethical thought and argues that it is in and through his balanced, subtle, and refined writings that we most see it in play. The piece summons Johnson’s own definition of ethics in his Preface to the Preceptor, an educational work written for the publisher Robert Dodsley (1748), and finds in the work of three thinkers – Isaac Watts, William Law, and Cicero – strong influential strands of thought that offered him both Christian and classical models for how humans should behave toward their fellow-beings. Johnson put in play questions of ethical behavior in his periodical writings, allowing him to present complex moral dilemmas from the multiple angles needed to encompass them. The chapter, taking up a hint from John Sitter, summons an ethical Johnson who might help us face twenty-first century problems with grace and inclusivity.

Unlike some ofthe poetic forms discussed in subsequent chapters, which have a discernible ‘vogue’ and then fall out of fashion, the 'moralizing lyric'was consistently popular throughout the whole of the period covered by this book, and several are among the most widely circulated poems of early modernity. Key examples, composed between the 1530s and the early eighteenth century, from Wyatt to Watts (and indeed well beyond that, far beyond the scope of this book), recognizably belong together. But this most ostensibly English of forms has its roots in the translation and imitation of classical poetry, and emerged in the sixteenth century in both Latin and English, with influence moving in both directions. As a starting point for this book, it demonstrates what can be learnt by a serious attention to literary bilingualism: repeatedly, it is the Latin versions , including translations of the best-known English examples into Latin, which point to the classical texts (especially Horace, Seneca and Boethius) that underpin these poems, and the (broadly) Latin lyric context to which they were understood to belong by contemporary readers.

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.

This essay emphasizes the centrality of evangelical women poets to the culture and development of early American poetics (including hymnody), which had lasting effects well into the nineteenth century. It makes three related claims. First, early evangelical poetry was a capacious lived literature that constituted one of the major aesthetic developments of the eighteenth century. Second, one of the momentous outgrowths of this eighteenth-century experiential Christian poetics was an early form of the Poetess, a trope scholars predominantly discuss as a nineteenth-century cultural form. And third, recognizing this longer development of the evangelical poetess resituates Phillis Wheatley Peters’ poetics within an antiwhite supremacist tradition produced by free and enslaved Black people. The essay argues for the necessity of broader and deeper engagement with various eighteenth-century religious poetics in order to braid them back together with the social forms and histories within which they arose and remained entangled.