It has been said that one of the finest achievements of the Church of England was the maintenance of one well-educated man in every English community. Such a man was Richard Graves. He is best remembered as the author of The Spiritual Quixote, an engaging comic novel written in the mid-eighteenth century. But his life was essentially that of a rural parson. In exploring that life, Clarence Tracy allows us a detailed view of rural English society of the period as well as an appreciation of Grave's writing. As the second son of a family of landed gentry, Graves was raised with a well-defined...

Richard Savage was a minor eighteenth-century poet, known chiefly today for his associations with Pope and Johnson, whose Life of Savage is a masterpiece. But his poetry is not merely valuable for the light it throws on Johnson and the tastes of the first half of the eighteenth century. It gives a clear picture of Savage's own somewhat sensational character and career, and is far more readable in its own right than has been suggested in the past. It epitomizes all the varying poetical styles of the time, but is much more personal and autobiographical than most Augustan verse. This definitive...