The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

104 son Bowers [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975], 144 [III.9]). Thomas Keymer St. Anne’s College, Oxford In volume VII, chapter 41, Tristram alludes to the proverbialwindinessofAvignon ; the editors note (3:492–93) that this refers to the mistral, ‘‘the northwest wind that sweeps down the Rhone valley’’and quote the one proverb they were able to locate, ‘‘Avignon venteuse, sans vent contagieuse’’ (‘‘Avignon is windy, without being contagious’’). A second proverb , perhaps more apropos, should be added to the present note. 644.25–26 and hearing . . . as a proverb ] The 1911 edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica, s.v. Avignon, offers the following as a ‘‘popular’’ if ‘‘somewhat exaggerated’’ proverb: ‘‘Avenie ventosa, sine vento venenosa, cum vento fastidiosa ’’ (‘‘windy Avignon, pest-ridden when there is no wind, wind-pestered when there is’’). Melvyn New University of Florida SCRIBLERIANA Three associates on The Scriblerian have stepped down: Cedric D. Reverand III (to whom we extend congratulations as the new editor of EighteenthCentury Life), Kathryn Temple, and Robert M. Phiddian (our Australian advisor). Their contributions will be missed, and we hope to carry occasional reviews and notes from them. We welcome David F. Venturo (The College of New Jersey), who is taking Ric Reverand’s place, Frank Boyle (Fordham University), who is replacing Kathy, and Ian Higgins (Australian National University), our new Australian advisor. We are grateful to Bryn Mawr College, The College of New Jersey, and Fordham University for becoming Scriblerian sponsors. The new Scriblerian website at www.scriblerian.net features tables of contents for recent issues as well as online subscription services. We pause to regret the deaths of two fine Scriblerian scholars: Michael V. De Porte, who contributed valuable work on Sterne and Swift, and David M. Vieth, a leading Rochester scholar of the past thirty years. EARL MINER Earl Miner (1927–2004) was one of the twentieth century’s great scholars of Comparative Literature, a pioneer in his attempts to transform it from a discipline blinded by its European provincialism to a discipline with a global vision. While he was best known for his work in seventeenth-century poetry, Japanese literature, and comparative poetics, his contributions to Restoration and eighteenthcentury studies were profound. In addition to serving the field throughout his career (as, for instance, President of ASECS, one of the editors of the California Dryden, and editor of the posthumous Paradise Lost, 1668–1968), he helped lay the foundation for the way we view the period today. In his triptych on seventeenth -century poetry—The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (1969), TheCavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (1971), and The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (1974)—he offered an anatomy of the period 105 that disrupted such undifferentiated classifications as ‘‘the Renaissance,’’at thesametime challenging still-reigning New Critical conventions through rigorous historical analysis. What he found in the period’s poetry was the modern subject, ‘‘greatly moving’’(he wrote) in its ‘‘search for itself, for others, and the world’’ (Restoration Mode). Attending to the relations of self to society, religion, and politics, Miner provided the long eighteenth century (among other things) the crucial recognition that Milton and Dryden belonged to the same poetic culture, one that turned to narrative to convert the public mode of the Cavalier poets into a concrete and passionately engaged politics. His work on Dryden transformed the poet from the dry spokesman he once seemed (‘‘healthy,’’ for T. S. Eliot, yet hopelessly prosaic) into a ‘‘radically public and engaged’’ poet of a revolutionary era (Dryden’s Poetry xiv); Dryden was seen as a writer whose poetic force emerges from the tension between, on the one hand, Christian humanism and Royalism and, on the other , progressivism and modernism; and one whose historical relativism is in constant tension with his faith in progress, in an ambivalence deeply kindred to our own. Throughout his career, Miner’s work was remarkably prescient, foreseeing concerns that became formative for the academy only late in the century. His first book, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (1958), is a remarkable work of intercultural exploration, identifying one mode of British and American ‘‘orientalism’’ (in a critique he helped shape long before Edward Said...