This is not a random collection of essays, but a book on a single theme. Written by separate hands, mainly by literary critics at Cambridge, it was planned as a whole and executed with a common purpose: to produce the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The authors share two convictions: they believe that the study of literature demands an understanding of whatever moral philosophy is embodied in it; and they believe that philosophical writings are capable of being tested by the techniques of literary criticism. In this book, such works as Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hume's Enquiries are viewed as whole works, not as repositories of philosophical propositions, nor as episodes in the history of English thought.

In this book Hugh Sykes Davies - novelist, poet and distinguished literary critic - addresses Wordworth's major poetry. Language, and its interaction with genius, is his central concern; but questions about Freud, Coleridge and the Romantic Imagination are raised and answered in the course of his stimulating survey. It reconstructs the poet's relationship with Mary Hutchinson and his sister Dorothy, focusing on the Dove Cottage menage during Wordsworth's most productive years. A remarkable combination of analytic and empathic intelligence, this book should earn a place among the few essential studies of the poet. Hugh Sykes Davies died in 1984, and this 1987 book was prepared for publication by John Kerrigan, a colleague at St John's College, Cambridge, and Jonathan Wordsworth, chairman of The Dove Cottage Trust, to which the author gave many years support as Trustee.