The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

202 well as their sexual dimension. For example , she suggests that Philips, writing tacitly erotic poetry to her female friends, disguises her homoerotic message in a political conceit: ‘‘longing’’ or ‘‘desire’’ can be expressed as longing for the return of the exiled monarch. Moreover, the necessity of secrecy in writing to royalist friends about royalist sympathies during the Interregnum mirrors the necessity of secrecy in acknowledging lesbian erotic desire. Chapter 4, which examines Behn— specifically, The Rover, The City Heiress , Oroonoko, and some of her poetry —is the odd one out. Her work appeared after the Restoration, and both her very public life in the theater and her ability to declare her royalist allegiances openly, mark her as quite different from Cavendish or Philips. However , Ms. Chalmers argues, Behn’s plays appeared in the wake of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, events that demanded the same ‘‘authorial strategies of subtlety and indirection’’ that Cavendish and Philips had employed in the 1650s. In fact, she borrows Behn’s phrase (from the dedication to her 1687 comedy The Luckey Chance) ‘‘secret Instructions to the People’’ to describe all of Behn’s work. That assertion seems something of a stretch, and the chapter on Behn never manages to fit as securely with the central argument as those on Cavendish and Philips, perhaps in part because Behn’s prodigious output and astonishing variety are hard to capture in a short space. The chapter on Behn notwithstanding , Ms. Chalmers develops dense, careful arguments in this book. Anyone working on Restoration writers must deftly navigate between poetry, fiction, and drama; this Ms. Chalmers does in her insightful and illuminating readings of the work of these writers. Moreover, Ms. Chalmers provides an important contribution to the study of Philips, a significant voice of the mid-seventeenth century whose work has been considerably less studied than that of Behn or even Cavendish. Yet two hundred pages are hardly sufficient to cover the topics explored in Royalist Women Writers. Ms. Chalmers could have tried to situate the women more securely within the often-complex political context in which they worked. Finally, the book as a whole reads less as a unity than as a series of well-executed, but nevertheless discrete, studies. There is certainly much for scholars to derive from Ms. Chalmers’s work, but the sum of the book’s parts does not add up to a greater understanding of seventeenth-century Royalist women writers as a whole. One hopes that the present volume is merely a prelude to more detailed study of this fascinating material. Noel Chevalier Luther College, University of Regina SCRIBLERIANA TRANSFERRED: RECENT LISTINGS AND ACQUISITIONS James E. May • The MS volume with 24 poems by Anne Wharton reported here in Fall 2006 as going to Yale has been catalogued as Osborn b408. The catalogue indicates that sev- 203 eral pages late in the volume (in cont. red morocco gilt) ‘‘are headed with poem titles but are otherwise blank’’; also, the volume includes a copy of Edmund Waller’s ‘‘Of Divine Poetry.’’ Yale acquired a MS in a single hand of Francis Atterbury’s English Advice to the Freeholders of England (1714), 71-p. with many blanks, 18 cm.; cont. panelled calf, gilt, bound with an undated printed catalogue description of the MS and an unrelated 4-p. household inventory (Osborn Shelves c598). Also added was an MS ‘‘Collection of old Ballads,’’ c. 320 pp., c. 1720s, with over 80 English ballads and folk songs, including ‘‘Chevy Chase,’’ ‘‘Wanton Wife of Bath,’’ and three Robin Hood ballads, many in the Ambrose Philips’s A Collection of Old Ballads (1723); cont. calf, with spine entitled ‘‘Ballads. MSS’’ (Osborn c599). The volume, once owned by Maurice Johnson of Spalding (1688–1755), contains some short contemporary poems and a partial index. Yale also acquired an MS of Thomas Sprat’s The Plague of Athens; 4to; 29 pp.; a poem first published in 1659 and frequently thereafter ; Yale suggests ‘‘1660s,’’ but the title identifies Sprat as ‘‘now Lord Bishop of Rochester,’’ which did not occur in printed editions until the 1680s. • Last year the Pierpont Morgan Library acquired from Roy Davids a copy of the 2nd...