John Mullan

Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton was uniquely helpful. Warton would know things, or know where to find them out. Man for minutiae that he was, Malone respected erudition, when it did not threaten him. Warton was one of his resources on the march to vicarious immortality.

Two descriptions of pleasure gardens, a novel feature in the cultural life of 18th-century Londoners:

In the Council Room of the Royal College of Surgeons hangs the portrait by Joshua Reynolds of the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. It has been much darkened by the bitumen content of Reynolds’s paint, and restoration work in the Fifties has not been able to prevent the fading into the surrounding gloom of many of its supporting details. Only Hunter’s face, once bathed in light, is still fairly clear. One can just make out that he is depicted at his writing table, caught, we are to imagine, in the midst of his thoughts. We cannot be shown his actual researches (it took Hogarth and Rowlandson to stoop, with the satirist’s relish, to the horrors of the anatomy room). Rather, we are to see the enlightenment to which the researches led. Hunter’s left hand is held pensively to his chin and his eyes look up, far over the viewer’s head, apparently seeing only his new knowledge of Nature’s works.

Jonathan Swift’s last formal composition, before he slipped into the dementia that swallowed him for the last five years of his life, was his own epitaph. In May 1740 he made his will, fastidiously apportioning his property and specifying arrangements for his interment. He stipulated that he be buried ‘as privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had been Dean since 1714. A tablet of black marble was to be fixed to the wall ‘with the following Inscription in large Letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded’:‘