He was disarmed by this gaze, and in the same moment, his heart was touched; he took Franziska's hand and kissed it, and then rapidly taking his leave, he spoke of letters to be written and went over to the other wing. Here he sat down at his desk but soon stood up again, to restore some peace to his mind by walking back and forth.

“It was a confession, the way she looked at me and asked for forgiveness with those intelligent eyes of hers. But what am I to forgive her? What is there to forgive? Nothing. During all the time I warned her against looking at life as a fairy tale, I’d invented a fairytale of my own, and her goodwill in bowing to my will strengthened my belief that a fairytale was possible. Yes—her goodwill in bowing to my will! That was it; she simply spoiled me. If she had said at the beginning, ‘There is one essential thing, Petofy, and I insist on it: we will stay in Vienna, with people around us, and I will not bury myself in the solitude of a castle; I must have followers and admirers around me, saying nice things to me, taking me to a concert one day, to the opera the next’—yes, if she had adopted a free tone like that from the outset, the freest possible, and kept things on the social and personal footing to which she had every right, then I would have been content with her conversation, and the fresh air of her bon sens and the sunshine of her unfailing good humor would have been my happiness. That was what I wanted, back then in Oslau.

Abstract: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg presented his inaugural lecture as professor of mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1770 on a contested topic of the time: probability theory and its relationship to gamblers’ choices in games of chance. This article considers Lichtenberg's lecture, in conjunction with his trenchant commentaries on the lottery in letters and aphorisms within the context of the fascination with the lottery prevalent in the late eighteenth century. Lichtenberg reflects on games of chance both as a scientific test case for the mathematics of probability and as a window into the social world and its individual actors. His engagement with the figure of the gambler in the context of mathematical probability and of life experience illuminates both the shifting contours of the discipline of mathematics and emergent conceptions and disciplinary understandings of subjectivity in the late eighteenth century. With attention to linguistic nuance, Lichtenberg probes the epistemic capacity and limitations of these diverse modes of inquiry to explore questions of mathematical models, individual circumstances and subjective judgment, and forms of rationality and irrationality that shape human behavior.

Keywords: Lichtenberg, probability, games of chance, lottery, subjectivity, rationality, modes of inquiry, interdiscursivity

“Ein wichtiges Spiel”

A few weeks before his death on February 24, 1799, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg recorded his dream from the night of February 9. He found himself in an establishment where others were eating and playing games of dice: “Bei dem Würfel-Spiel saß eine lange, hagere Frau und strickte.

In the early medieval period, manuscript production depended fundamentally on pastoral agriculture, since livestock provided the hides on which most books were written during this period. This entanglement of intellectual life with pastoral work is related vividly in the story of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise (ca. early–mid-sixth century). A precocious and troublesome young man, Ciarán tended his family's herds, performing miracles to compensate for the cows he gave away in his generosity, including his uncle's valuable plough-ox. On one occasion, when Ciarán's mother refused a drink to thirsty travelers, the saint, waiting until his elders were at their work (operibus), demonstrated his disapproval by destroying their provisions: he dumped the milk, put sheep's manure in the butter, and fed the bread to the dogs, arguing that anyone who would deny food to visitors does not deserve to consume it. When Ciarán departed for Clonard to study with St. Finian, he requested a cow from his mother and father so ‘her milk [could] sustain him’ at school (ad scolam duceretur, causa lactis eius pro sustentacione eius). His mother refused, since ‘“others who are in that school have no [cows]”’ (‘alii qui sunt in illa scola vac[c]as non habent’). Disregarding her objection, Ciarán acquired his cow in a somewhat extra-legal fashion, overriding his parents’ rights of ownership: ‘coming to the cattle of his parents, he blessed a cow, and commanded her in the name of the Lord to follow him…. [and she] followed him with her new-born calf’ (veniens ad armentum parentum suorum benedixit vnam vac[c]am, et iussit ei in nomine Domini, ut sequeretur se. Et … vac[c]a secuta est eum cum vitulo suo nuper nato).

A man's wisdom is little valued if he's poor. People have no standing unless they’ve money. But I respect wisdom more than wealth: wealth soon runs out! A man plunges from wealth to poverty in no time – and from then on he’ll find doors slow to open. When he comes to court he’ll soon be on his way again, barred entry. I tell you, let me make it plain: a man with nothing is treated with contempt, unwelcome in the company of the rich. But when he has intelligence he has this asset: it won't be long before it's recognised: ‘He knows things!’ Many are the men who’ve^# piled up wealth who haven't got a clue!

That's why I plan to put a pleasing story into rhyme. Since I’m possessed of wit if nothing else, I shan't shirk – regardless of the toil involved – from telling a splendid tale. And if some sour-tongued person hears me and is envious and aggrieved that I enjoy my life and wants to backbite, I hope it bites him back. It's up to me what I think (and I have wit!), and if my thoughts are happy ones he shouldn't be bothered and upset. A curse on the envious: blast their eyes! However much it pains them, I mean to tell – as long as I have strength and time – a fine, delightful tale. It's not about the Round Table, King Arthur or his knights, but the story I’ll tell and relay to you is a fine one, a true delight, for there's matter to be sung as well as read, and the songs fit perfectly with the spoken verse. I call on those who hear to vouch for this.

The Creation of the Consular Service

The United States established its consular service, as separate from its diplomatic service, at the end of the eighteenth century, in 1792. This was the beginning of an era when the consular services of many nations were large, trusted and influential. During this time, nearly every country of Europe and the Americas had a consular service; the primary functions of them all were the same: to protect their country's commerce and navigation, and their seamen in foreign ports. The fledgling American consular service, before its duties were outlined in an act passed in 1792, was developed, in a very large part, out of the experiences and mistakes of early American diplomats and consuls in France.

In 1776, the Continental Congress appointed three men to be commissioners to France: Silas Deane, a businessman of dubious character who may have been a spy, Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father of mythological integrity whose Quaker ways reputedly met their match in the Parisian gaiety of pre-Revolutionary France, and Arthur Lee, who had been America's first representative to Great Britain, may also have been a spy and who despised both France and Franklin. Each was given “infinite powers” to negotiate agreements with France that would help America's independence effort.

The inevitable confusion caused by three distinct representatives with such powers in the same place and at the same time was recognized almost immediately.

In recent decades, the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Scotland has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The magnetic pull of such thinkers as David Hume (1711–76), Adam Smith (1723–90) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) has helped to make this field one of the most fruitful in Scottish historical studies. Historians have defined the Scottish Enlightenment in various ways. Some have described an exclusive club for scholars of international stature, whose works examined the moral, social and economic questions pondered by intellectuals across Europe. Without denying the importance of these enquiries, many historians domesticate the Scottish Enlightenment, tracing its concerns to debates about Scotland's purpose after union with England in 1707. In this view, the Scottish Enlightenment was fundamentally a movement for the reform of the country's institutions, economy and intellectual culture.

Scotland's universities expanded, remodelled their curricula and attracted more eminent staff. Without abandoning Reformed teachings, the Church of Scotland became more tolerant of new ideas, incubating the polite scholarship of its highly educated clergy. Historians have portrayed both the Kirk's Moderate party around William Robertson (1721–93) and figures among their evangelical rivals as Scottish exponents of ‘religious Enlightenment’. Scots of various stripes promoted agricultural improvement, new clubs and societies and the enrichment of the country under its Hanoverian monarchs and as a partner with England in the British Empire. Reflecting on their rapidly changing society, Scottish intellectuals produced theories of economic and social progress.

Having described how partisan conflicts in politics and religion in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution were introduced through Collier's pamphleteering into the seemingly non-political Stage Controversy, the second half of this book moves beyond the conventional definition of this event as a pamphlet war. It argues that Reform Comedy, as a major way in which the playwrights participated in the Stage Controversy, allowed them to shape audiences’ political sentiments without making references to politics. The development of Reform Comedy after 1698 can be divided into two phases. The turning point was Cibber's generally acknowledged reform comedy, The Careless Husband (first performed on 7 December 1704 at Drury Lane). Without its tremendous success, Reform Comedy would not have been considered a sub-genre. This book differentiates between the dominant patterns in the two phases by using two different terms: those before The Careless Husband, which had stronger traits of Restoration Comedy, are ‘pseudo-reform comedies’; those after it, with intentionally fewer such characteristics, are reform comedies.

When the pseudo-reform comedies appeared, the London theatres were deep in crisis. In fact, this type of comedy was one of the experiments intended to tackle that crisis. A browse through A Comparison between the Two Stages (1702) reveals the playwrights’ despair at the high rate of failure of new plays between 1695 and the early 1700s.

Why did writers seem so angry and eager to fight in the 1590s? In many ways conflict has always been the substance of literary culture and we have never really been without culture wars. However, more seems to have been at stake than simply an argument about what was good and what was bad in 1590s England, long considered one of the ‘golden ages’ of English writing. In this essay I will explore some examples from that period and show how the Nashe-Harvey Quarrel was a central feature of English culture, defining the divisions that structured debates, as well as being precipitated by them. The essay has four main sections: the first deals with the role played by the poet Barnabe Barnes in debates; the second explores his representation of sexuality in poetry; the third looks at the debates about quantitative metre, and whether such poetry could be considered ‘bad’; before, a fourth, suggests some conclusions.

BAD BARNABE BARNES

Few sixteenth-century English poets have attracted quite as much opprobrium as Barnabe Barnes (c.1571–1609), the poet and playwright, best known now for his sonnet sequence, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), and his anti-papal play, The Divil's Charter (1607). Of course, many poets, such as Thomas Churchyard, George Chapman, and, even, Michael Drayton, are sometimes thought of as rather less inspiring than many of their contemporaries.

The first part (1) of this evidence comes from the files of Lord Colville, ADM 1/482. His papers are complete and give condemnation of the vessel, followed by the financial breakdown of the proceeds of the sale of The Two Brothers and her cargo, and also the costs involved.

Burnett, perhaps having recognised the brothers Le Roy, Nicholas Le Mesurier and James Major from his years based in Guernsey acting against smugglers, seized the ship notwithstanding the customs dues paid. Despite permission having been given by Murray, the Governor of Quebec, for the cargo to be unloaded there, Burnett ‘scuttled the decks’ to remove the brandy, took the vessel to Halifax, out of Murray's jurisdiction, and libelled her in the Vice Admiralty Court in Halifax. There she was condemned and sold, as detailed below.

Instigated by Lloyd’s, which had insured the vessel, the owners and master of The Two Brothers appealed 2 June 1762. The Judicial Committee in London reversed the sentence of condemnation, and the ship and cargo were ordered to be restored 16 March 1763. What happened next? Was Burnett ordered to refund the value of the vessel and her cargo? Not much of the brandy would have survived. Was the slush fund invoked?

Section (2) is from the printed reports of the Privy Council's Appeal cases on the shelves of the Reading Room in the National Archives.