Volume 12, Number 4 · February 27, 1969
Formidable Miniature
By V.S. Pritchett
Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius 1688-1728
by Peter Quennell
Stein and Day, 278 pp., $7.95
Mr. Quennell's biographical studies in the Regency and eighteenth century are known for their feeling for the elegant and bizarre, but not for this quality alone. His Byron, his essays on Boswell, Hogarth, and Gibbon, and particularly on Sterne, show an historian's care, a moralist's curiosity about human nature but, above all, a searching interest in the crystallization of each artist's imagination; and, like pretty well everyone since Lytton Strachey, he is indifferent to the denigration of everything in the eighteenth century by the Romantics of the headstrong Victorian Age.
Review, 1885 words
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