This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.

An intepretation of Leo Strausss chapter on The Prince in Thoughts on Machiavelli. Strausss main intent is to show his students how to understand an esoteric work.

As a member of the National Assembly and (for five months) Foreign Minister, Tocqueville played an important role in the history of the French Second Republic. His Recollections offer a fascinating picture of the major actors, the revolutionary journées, and his unhappy experience as minister. One remarkable feature of the Recollections is the brutal clarity of Tocqueville’s judgments. By his own account, it was not a work of history but a memoir written “for myself alone.” In prose marked by a somewhat archaic elegance, Tocqueville vividly conveys a sense of the hopes and fears of the propertied classes. He takes a dark view of both the July Monarchy and the republicans and socialists who brought it down. He argues that by limiting politics to a narrow stratum, the July Monarchy had fatally impoverished the notion of public interest and that the radicals who had a chance at power in 1848 were so lacking in political experience that they could only play at revolution, mimicking the roles and gestures of the revolutionaries of 1789–1794. The chapter includes a substantial discussion of Tocqueville’s tenure as Foreign Minister and his role in the French overthrow of the Roman Republic and the restoration of papal power in Rome.

Lupercus is addressed twice in Pliny’s collection, receiving two very different pieces of Quintilianic imitation. Epistles 9.26 is a partner-letter to Epistles 1.20 (subject of Chapter 6), arguing for audacity in oratory. It opens with another window imitation (Institutio 2 and De oratore), and proceeds – I suggest – to some especially free imitatio of Institutio 12.10, completing in quite different fashion the work begun in Epistles 1.20. Epistles 2.5 is a partner to Epistles 7.9 (subject of Chapter 8), and behaves differently again. A relatively short letter, it features dense, eclectic and wide-ranging imitation of the Institutio. More than that: with two more window imitations (Cicero and Seneca the Elder), I argue, the letter miniaturises Quintilian’s first book and styles itself as a belated proem to Pliny’s collection.