Addison, Joseph, Cato

Suggested date of reading: by 1791

References: Cornell DS 40

In Descriptive Sketches W alludes to Syphax's description of an African who ‘Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury’ (Cato I iv 71).

Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773)

Suggested date of reading: by spring 1787

References: see note

Miscellaneous Pieces contains a Gothic prose fragment called Sir Bertrand from which W borrowed several details for one of the central episodes in The Vale of Esthwaite, composed during the spring and summer of 1787 (lines 210-21 in De Selincourt's text). The episode begins:

Although W may be thinking of the castellated and partly ruined Calgarth Hall on the eastern shore of Windermere, the description probably borrows from Sir Bertrand: ‘by momentary glimpse of moon-light he had a full view of a large antique mansion, with turrets at the corners’ (Miscellaneous Pieces 129).

Akenside, Mark

(i) The Poems of Mark Akenside [1772]

Suggested date of reading: 1779-87; by spring 1785

References: see note

W's earliest surviving poem, Lines Written as a School Exercise (1785), contains a reference to ‘fair majestic truth’ (line 12). Akenside's invocations at the beginning of The Pleasures of Imagination include one to ‘The guide, the guardian of their lovely sports, / Majestic Truth’ (i 22-3).