This volume presents fifteen original essays that move from structural and thematic subjects to matters of historical and cultural significance. Contributors to cover a remarkably wide variety of the literary interests and figures of England from the Augustan Age until midcentury including the periodical, , Defoe, Fielding, the episodic novel as a genre, Smollett, Sterne, and the poetry of Swift and Pope. Its variety and liveliness aptly convey the vigor of the neoclassical age itself where there were many quick springs of sense.