Owain Glyndwr (died c. 1416) was the last Welshman to hold the title of Prince of Wales. In 1400 he led a rebellion against king Henry IV and English rule in Wales. In 1406 he addressed a letter, now known as the Pennal Letter, to king Charles VI of France asking for support in persuading the schismatic pope Benedict XIII to help Wales to exist as an independent state with a Church and universities of its own.

Willibald of Mainz, an Anglo-Saxon who moved to Germany, wrote a biography of Boniface around 760, tracing his life from his birth in Devon, his studies in England to his missionary work in Germany. The Latin and the structure of this work are of a high quality. Like many other missionaries, Boniface also visited Rome, to obtain the Pope’s approval.

This chapter explores David Ferry’s poetical recreations of Johnsonian prose under the aspect of “compassion.” Attention is initially focussed on Ferry’s poetical re-working of a passage from the “Life of Pope” on Pope’s physical disablements. The poem “Johnson on Pope – from the Lives of the Poets” (1960) is compelling. The chapter highlights how Johnson’s critical prose can be closely associated with the language of poetry. With each reading his language sinks deeper into our consciousnesses and eludes paraphrase. Also discussed are lines from Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner” and use of a passage from Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry (1757). Through the language of his modern poem Ferry brings out the poignancy of suffering in the closing stages of life. This discussion is reinforced by a close analysis of Johnson on the final years of Jonathan Swift from the “Life of Swift.” Ferry’s formula – that of “unsentimental pity” – is then the basis for a closing examination of the final decline of the poet William Collins, one of the poets from the Lives of the Poets Johnson had known in person.

This chapter suggests how Johnson gained from his acquaintance with the criticism of John Dennis. Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare, Addison and Pope are all shaped by his reflections on the older critic, whose work Johnson quotes more fully than he does any other. Johnson’s response to Dennis is usually to disagree; but there is also respect, and acknowledgment that Dennis had good points to make about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a poem that was for Johnson a success. Dennis’s reflections on Shakespeare and his complaints that Shakespeare failed to obey decorum trigger Johnson’s most eloquent passages in the Preface. In Johnson’s note to King Lear, where Johnson is lamenting the death of Cordelia, it is to Dennis that Johnson turns when calibrating his own uncertain yet distressed reactions to the play. Similarly, Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated of eighteenth-century tragedies, Addison’s Cato, offered the opportunity for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and a “poet of nature.” There is truth as well as satire in Johnson’s description of Dennis as a “formidable assailant.” Johnson fulfills an obligation of fairness to his critical past.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

In 1810, news reached Byron of the death of John Edleston, whom he had loved when he was at Cambridge. He wrote to Hobhouse that the news had left him ‘rather low’, and ‘more affected than I should care to own elsewhere; Death has been lately so occupied with every thing that was mine, that the dissolution of the most remote connection is like taking a crown from a Miser’s last Guinea’. But then he changes the subject, though in a way that may nevertheless be responding to that feeling of loss and separation.

Writing to Lord Holland in 1812, Byron anxiously petitioned the peer for help in completion of a couplet: ‘I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another.—I always scrawl in this way, and smoother as much as I can but never sufficiently, & latterly I can weave a nine line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning’ (BLJ, II. 210). Byron’s implausible boast about the velocity of his Spenserian scribbles is in part an attempt to re-establish his poetic credentials with a socially superior friend, yet it remains an odd pretension to assert. Not because of the improbability that he could write nine rhymed lines that incorporated a terminating couplet of sorts faster than a single pair, but because by the date of this letter he had already proven his skill in the couplet form in no fewer than three satires – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Hints from Horace (wr. 1811) and The Curse of Minerva (also wr. 1811) – and would soon compose his second blockbuster Eastern narrative, The Corsair (1814) in the same form. For the purposes of this chapter, what’s most intriguing about Byron’s brag is not that he is dismissive of a form he returned to throughout his life, but that the forms that most preoccupied him during his early career were avowedly English.

This chapter surveys the origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century literary criticism, as major poets were examined in the light of concepts such as ‘beauty’. The treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French critics, followed by Addison, Shaftesbury, and later thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given to Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of ‘belles lettres’. The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as ‘sublime,’ ‘taste,’ ‘genius,’ ‘originality,’ ‘imagination, and ‘art’ itself. An important element is the place of creative writers as aesthetic theorists, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary of aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.

In this chapter, I argue that Pope’s poetry is profoundly concerned with the deleterious effects of unbelief and that, at the same time, he found atheistical materialism creatively productive. First, I chart Pope’s career-long engagement with religion, paying special attention to his numerous clarion calls for unity across confessional divides and to atheism’s negative role in bringing this unity about. I address broad swathes of Pope’s work, including the Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1714), the Horatian imitations and Moral Essays of the 1730s, and, most critically, the Essay on Man (1734). After tracing Pope’s ecumenical impulses, I turn to the 1743 Dunciad, showing how the final iteration of Pope’s mock-epic masterpiece incorporates and expels godlessness at almost every turn: from the replacement of Lewis Theobald as King Dunce by Colley Cibber, whose gaming addiction Pope consistently ridicules and aligns with atheistic notions of chance, fortune, and chaos, to the dunces’ intellectual vacuity and Pope’s “Epicurean” method of composition, I show how the poem is haunted by God’s absence from start to finish.

Hobbes’s On the Citizen discussed religion and church-state relations less fully than his later Leviathan. In Leviathan, he trenchantly attacked theories which granted the clergy power that was independent from that of the state and its sovereign. In On the Citizen, he expressed his views with greater moderation and circumspection. Modern scholars debate whether Hobbes changed his ideas or just his tone between the two books. This chapter discusses the evidence for and against the claim that On the Citizen put forward relatively conventional views on the relationship between the powers of the state and the church, and that it was only in Leviathan that he abandoned a theory that was close to orthodox Anglicanism, and characteristic of royalists at the time of the English Civil War. The chapter examines what Hobbes said in On the Citizen, and also discusses the ideas of some of his contemporaries. It notes that the book soon encountered criticism for its contentions concerning religion and church-state relations, and especially for granting the sovereign too great power over the church and the clergy. It argues that the theory presented in On the Citizen is not so very distant from that which Hobbes espoused in Leviathan.