'Climacteric' (from the Greek for 'ladder') as a word and concept appears first in English at about the end of the sixteenth century. It identifies a critical moment in the life of an individual or a nation, so it is not surprising that it should come into currency around the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and become a familiar usage as the course of the Stuart dynasty moves toward armed rebellion and civic upheaval. In 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' Marvell predicts that 'to all States not free' Cromwell will 'Clymacterick be' (lines 103-4),at thesame overwhelming military prowess Cromwell has displayed in subduing the Irish rebellion may be deployed against the remaining monarchic states of Europe. He implies that the triumphant Protestant general embodies the force of change that marks a crucial moment of history. The occasion for his writing the 'Ode' is also a climacteric moment in the poet's own development.

The American feminist poet, Adrienne Rich, remarks how, as a student in her early twenties, she was led to believe that poetry was 'the expression of a higher world view, what the critic Edward Said has termed “a quasireligious wonder,” instead of a human sign to be understood in secular and social terms'. My starting place is to remark that whatever conditions underlie Rich's sense of the opposition between poetry as transcendental expression and poetry as a sign system to be understood in secular and social terms, the conflict is misleading, although in interesting ways, when applied to a pre-Romantic (who is sometimes thought to be a proto- Romantic) like Vaughan, despite the fact that he is almost always remembered as the signal instance of a seventeenth-century poet who became memorable once he became a poet of transcendence: 'Lord, then said I, On me one breath, I And let me dye before my death'

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Donne's poems expressed a strong and independent spirit. For all their indebtedness to literary traditions and conventions, they took a sceptical stance toward many received ideas and seemed written in a 'new made Idiome'. The importance of his innovation was recognized by Thomas Carew, who praised Donne as the monarch of wit who 'purg'd' 'The Muses garden', threw away 'the lazie seeds / Of Servile imitation ... And fresh invention planted'.

Part of Donne's freshness comes from his intense analysis of important aspects of human experience - the desire for love, the desire to be purged of imperfection or sinfulness, and the longing to defeat mortality. He explores erotic love and human spirituality and the relation between them. Because his poetry speaks to needs and desires that seem to persist despite cultural and historical differences, Donne is accessible, compelling, and engaging. But his poetry is also difficult and complicated. Individual poems refuse to yield a single, unequivocal meaning, and his poetry exhibits considerable variety, defying readers' attempts to reduce it to a neat order.

Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace, together with Robert Herrick, the subject of a separate essay, frequently have been seen by the critical tradition to constitute a group, often termed 'Cavalier' poets. The configuration is of considerable antiquity, and some points of association between some of them were sometimes recognized in the mid seventeenth century, shortly after the death of Carew (in 1640?) and Suckling (in 1641?). The perception that they are in some senses a group persists, reinforced by modern anthologists as well as critics. The agenda of this essay is to explain and thus dismantle the origins of that critical orthodoxy and to distinguish the characteristics not only of individual poets but also of the Caroline court culture before and after the inception of the Civil War, though paradoxically the mere title works to confirm that which I would set aside.

Carew (born c.1594) and Herrick (born 1591) reached creative maturity in the 1620s and early 1630s and Suckling (born 1609) flourished throughout the 1630s, yet very little of their poetry appeared in print before 1640. Their poems lived, rather, in the song settings of court musicians and in manuscript circulation, at first, no doubt, within the court coterie and among friends, and later in a widening circle of manuscript anthologies. When their pre-1640 works were delivered into print it was into a radically changed political and cultural world from that in which they were conceived. Lovelace and Herrick, publishing their major collections in 1648 and 1649, had the opportunity to revise and organize their works in the light of the dispersal of the Caroline court and the eclipse of the royalist cause, and they could and did write works in the 1640s which engaged both their personal catastrophes and those of the cause they espoused. For Carew and Suckling, their work was absorbed into that process of royalist lamentation as if through a process of retrospective revision.

In the English Renaissance, poetic texts were related to their social contexts both in their original conditions of production and in their subsequent history of reception through the media of manuscript and print. Since lyric poems, in particular, were primarily occasional, composed in specific circumstances for known audiences, factors of class, gender, patronage, kinship, friendship, political partisanship, and religious allegiance were inseparable from aesthetic issues in such works. Poets were acutely conscious of the social contexts of their work, and, especially when their poems were disseminated in manuscript, readers were able to appropriate poetic artefacts and adapt them to their individual needs. In the course of the seventeenth century lyrics were in the process of changing their status from that of ephemeral productions transmitted in manuscript within restricted social environments to that of durable artefacts widely distributed through the medium of print. While most lyric poetry first circulated in manuscript to family members, friends, colleagues, and patrons had specific social uses, print culture began to highlight the aesthetic features of poems, recontextualized their meanings, and preserved them for readerships beyond their original audiences.

Richard Crashaw (1612/13-49) was revived early in the twentieth century as a 'Metaphysical' poet and as a member of the 'School of Donne'. In some ways that classification was advantageous to his status, because he gained a degree of recognition by riding on Donne's coat-tails in the great wave of popularity inspired by H. J. C. Grierson, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, William Empson, A. Alvarez, George Williamson, Frank Kermode, and scores of other famous advocates of metaphysical poetry as a kind of forerunner of our modern sensibility. The great disadvantage of being placed this way, however, was that Crashaw was vigorously assailed, by Leavis, Empson, Robert M. Adams and others, for not being just like Donne. Indeed, mid-twentieth-century criticism is full of violent (and often very funny) attacks on Crashaw's poetry as, among other things, neurotic, perverted, feminine, infantile, 'foreign', extravagant, tasteless, Catholic, and even cannibalistic. Some central quality in his poetry has consistently outraged critical tempers, inspiring otherwise moderate writers to reach for their purplest prose. One's first reaction to this phenomenon is that a poet who elicits such strong opposition - yet who continues to be reprinted, read, enjoyed, and argued about - cannot be all that bad. He must still have something important to tell us.

Ben Jonson wrote plays before he wrote poems and laid bricks before he did either. These activities - to which we should add his still later writing of court masques and entertainments - represent steps in a difficult but extraordinarily successful climb Jonson made up the steep face of fortune's hill, a climb that marked everything he wrote.

According to his own account, Jonson was born the posthumous son of an English clergyman, the grandson of 'a gentleman' who had served King Henry VIII. But this gentle lineage was obscured by his mother's marriage to a London bricklayer, whose craft Jonson was 'put to' at the age of sixteen: a humiliation he could, as he later said, 'not endure'. Military service in the Low Countries offered a first escape from bricklaying; acting and writing plays provided a second. The rapid success Jonson achieved as a playwright did not, however, satisfy his ambition — nor could it. The audience for plays was predominantly common and unlearned; actors were mere artisans; playwrights were a rag-tag mix of would-be gentlemen and players. Writing poems and circulating them through the private network of manuscript transmission opened the way to more elevated company. Among Jonson's earliest datable poems are an epitaph on Margaret Radcliffe (a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth), an ode to James, Earl of Desmond, a 'proludium' and 'epode' to Sir John Salusbury, an ode to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and a verse epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland — all figures of considerable social distinction. But Jonson did not stop there. The production of masques and entertainments carried him still higher, to the royal summit of power and prestige. He wrote masques and entertainments directly for the king, who was their chief spectator; they were performed by the queen, the princes, and the leading aristocratic courtiers.

The relation of genre to tradition in the seventeenth century was not simple. For one thing, tradition itself was composite; being intricately divided into pagan-antique and Christian strands, the Christian into Protestant and Catholic, and the Protestant further split by sect. For another, whereas emphasis on genre seems to imply engagement with a stable body of literature, the period itself was one of radical social changes, rapidly changing valuation of literary textuality, and deliberate literary innovation. The complexity was such that several stories about genre probably need to be disengaged. One of them might narrate how epigram came to dominate the literary scene, determining its minutest operations. Another, how georgic, after being exiled from poetry, was at last welcomed back and thought its most refined, consummate representative. A third story could tell of promotions and demotions in the hierarchy of kinds. In a fourth, changes in the concept of genre itself would be the theme: changes responding to alterations in the practice of imitation.

It would be difficult and indeed absurd to approach Milton's poetry without an awareness of his revolutionary commitment. One of the foremost polemicists against the bishops, the monarchy, and the rest of the baggage of the old order, he became Latin secretary to the republican Council of State and official propagandist of the new regime with his great Defences of the English people. After the Restoration his life was in danger, he was imprisoned and some of the books that he wrote were burned. Yet when we turn to his first book of Poems, the political, the revolutionary are not the immediate impression we receive. Certainly the volume includes early work dating from before the revolutionary years. Yet the collection was published in 1645, after the conclusion of the first phase of the Civil War and at a point when Milton had already published polemical and increasingly radical prose tracts - Of Reformation in England (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Areopagitica (1644).

The posthumous publication in 1633 of a small volume entitled The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, By Mr George Herbert was one of the most notable events in the history of seventeenth-century English poetry and devotion. Within seven years the book was into its sixth edition, and five subsequent editions appeared before the century was out. It was read by members of a whole spectrum of religious and political groups in that most sectarian of periods in English history; Cromwell's personal chaplain recommended The Temple to his own son, and Charles I read it in captivity before his execution. Herbert became known as the 'sweet singer of the Temple', inviting comparisons with the Psalmist; he alone in his age was said to be one who 'rightly knew to touch Davids Harpe'. The poems were widely imitated by seventeenth-century writers, and cited by other admiring early readers in texts of piety and education. The foundations were laid for an appreciation of possibly the greatest devotional poet in the English language.

Hume's observations on art are set in the framework of social life, which is why he considers both the making of, and response to, works of art as human actions subject to the analysis he has offered of other human actions. Although he never published his intended treatise on “criticism” (T Adv [xii]) and no explicit theories of beauty, art, or criticism are to be found in his works, by bringing together his scattered remarks on these subjects, and by looking at his general aims and the context in which he wrote, we can identify his principal views on these topics.

CONTEXT

In establishing Hume's views on what today we call aesthetics, it is important to note their date and their context, and also to recognize that his experiences and references, in almost every respect except the crucial one of classical literature, were narrower than those of an informed modern reader. Concepts of, and attitudes to, the different arts in the 1740s differed from ours, as did artistic practices and expectations,- access to the arts and the availability of them were limited. Hume always claimed to base his tenets on experience, and it is therefore doubly important to understand the intellectual environment in which he wrote. Most of his observations were made within a thirty-year period beginning in the late 1720s, at the outset of the social and intellectual revolutions that were to gain rapid momentum in the second half of the eighteenth century and to transform Europe.

David Hume's essays were “the cradle of economics” suggested John Hill Burton, in the first important biography of Hume. Although this may be a biographer's exaggeration, there can be no doubt that Hume's work provides an important contribution to economics as a discipline together with a significant critique of the types of policy recommendations which are associated with the mercantilist position.

ECONOMICS: THE BACKGROUND

Mercantilism is difficult to define. It has been aptly described as "a shifting combination of tendencies which, although directed to a common aim - the increase of national power - seldom possessed a unified system of policy, or even a harmonious set of doctrines. It was a very complicated web of which the threads mingled inextricably." Hume, unlike Adam Smith, made no attempt to treat mercantilism as a system, but he did identify a number of "threads" in the literature.

First, Hume drew attention to the position that foreign trade is more important than domestic, a point of view which is admirably summarised by the title of Thomas Munn's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade. Or, The Ballance of our Forraign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure (1630). Second, he identified the associated concern with the determinants of the rate of interest when he examined the view that interest was determined by the quantity of money. Third, he considered the claim that industry "would not emerge spontaneously, it would have to be induced by legislation, " a point which is neatly caught in William Petyt's Britannia Languens (1680).

Among all the philosophers who wrote before the twentieth century none is more important for the philosophy of science than David Hume. This is because Hume is widely recognized to have been the chief philosophical inspiration of the most important twentieth century school in the philosophy of science - the so-called logical positivists. These philosophers began to work in Vienna in the late twenties, but by the end of the Second World War most of them had come to the United States. Many of them preferred the name logical empiricists, in part to emphasize their greater debt to Hume than to Comte. They recognized that Hume raised a variety of issues that set the agenda for their program in the philosophy of science. It is jointly because of his impact on this agenda and because of the influence the philosophy of science acquired over this period that, after the First World War, Hume came to be regarded as the most important philosopher to have written in the English language.

Hume's knowledge of the science of his time is a matter of some controversy. Although in the Treatise he announced that he intended to bring "the experimental method of reasoning" to moral subjects, substantive science plays only a small role in Hume's writings, and there is little discussion of issues raised by Newtonian mechanics, the focus of much work in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. As Noxon says, the Treatise "is as unmathematical as Ovid's Metamorphoses." Yet there seems ample evidence to suppose that Hume's philosophy was animated by his interpretation of Newton's substantive and methodological views, as well as those of Hooke and Boyle.

The first volume of Hume's History of England, dealing with the early Stuarts, appeared in 1754. The final volumes, covering the period from the invasion of Julius Caesar to 1485, appeared in 1762, although Hume was occupied with revisions of the whole work until his death. In writing history, Hume was partly creating, partly responding to, a new market. In 1757, he thought history “the most popular kind of writing of any” (HL 1: 244). In 1770, he wrote, “I believe this is the historical Age and this [Scotland] the historical Nation” (HL 2: 230). He knew of no less than eight histories that were currently being written. The year before, in England, he had declared, “History, I think, is the Favourite Reading”(HL 2: 196). Hume and his friend William Robertson were in large part responsible for this new popularity of history, much of it written by Scotsmen for English readers. Hume himself had received unprecedented payments for his History (for which he sold the copyright on each volume, rather than collecting royalties): he made at least £3,200 on the whole, at a time when a friend of his could consider himself well to do on £80 per annum (HL 1: 193, 255, 266, 314). Although in practice his History seems to have sold less well during his lifetime than the various volumes of his Essays, Hume was consistently of the opinion that this was his bookseller's fault. The market for history books was potentially far larger (HL 2: 106, 229, 233, 242).

The above passage comes from a pamphlet written by David Hume to secure a readership for his largely unappreciated Treatise of Human Nature. Though not successful in this regard, the Abstract remains a valuable guide to Hume's Treatise, for it offers his own assessment of the significance of that work. Here, at least, Hume is unequivocal in describing his philosophy as “very sceptical.” But even if Hume describes his philosophy in this way, and even if, at the time, his philosophy was almost universally taken in this light, it remains unclear, first, what this scepticism amounts to and, second, how this scepticism is related to other aspects of his philosophical program. The goal of this essay is to answer both of these questions. I begin by giving a broad sketch of the role of scepticism in Hume's philosophy and then, in succeeding sections, offer a detailed analysis of the central sceptical arguments.

David Hume believed that most of the views about society and politics prevalent in his day had roots in one or another of “two species of false religion” superstition and enthusiasm. Both were developments of conflicting theological doctrines that appealed to two different types of personalities. Both had come to be associated with opposing political interests. Both sprang from ignorance. And, while the two species had been universally present in society and in individuals in varying degrees throughout history, the peculiarity of modern post-Reformation Europe was the violent oscillation between them, as evidenced by the many wars of religion. Their more extreme adherents were also, not least, responsible for the plight of modern Britain, both north and south. One of the tasks of the philosophical historian, Hume believed, was to explain the preponderance at particular times of one or the other of these persuasions. The task he set for his political theory was to explain why both were philosophically misconceived, empirically untenable, and, in their extreme forms, politically dangerous.

THE POLITICS OF RELIGION

One part of humanity, Hume notes, has a tendency to "weakness, fear, [and] melancholy, together with ignorance." In this state, the imagination conjures up forces operating under the surface, and the mind is prone to grasp methods of influencing these forces by "ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices, presents, or [by] any practice, however absurd or frivolous which either folly or knavery recommends to a blind and terrified credulity." This condition and these practices Hume calls superstition. In religion, priests, church establishments, and rituals are used to mediate between the individual and these forces. In society and in politics, the superstitious person is disposed to accept established forms and powers as inherent in the nature of things and to see society as a hierarchical structure with a monarch as the unitary source of authority and sovereignty as a divine right (E-SE, 74).