Read Samuel Johnson.

>Love seeing references to Addison and De Quincey. Some of the greatest writers in the language but I never see them brought up here.

Bloody 'ell, the anti-Angloism!

Seriously though, the English sensibility is pretty much antithetical to that of this board, always has been. But yes, those authors seem cool and the whole world of letters in England in the wake of Johnson's reinvigorating the essay form was such a thriving, fertile environment. I think what people often also miss on IQfy, due to the tendency of taking particular great works and comparing them in an isolated fashion, is the living, breathing, interactive context that gives literature a real sense of place, and forms like essays where authors can free-associate about literature do a great job of illuminating the said context when it comes to other works, while also themselves serving as basic units which when taken together with other essays, poems, letters, etc., form the texture of that context for their own time. When you really get immersed in that context, it's so much easier to understand what's going on with any given particular work, and the difference in the reading experience is like the difference between looking at a single flower in a nondescript room vs. actually being out in nature. And the cultural scene of that place and time exemplified that aspect of literature, its members lived and breathed their art so naturally that it's hard for their works to be presented in a way that fits the paradigm by which IQfy conceptualizes these things.

I think that for any sincere reader, the attainment of this type of understanding constitutes the dawning of a new day for his enjoyment of literature and for his understanding of it. It may demystify some works and authors in a way that deprives them of some of their shine, but the overall picture that one gains in compensation is a total qualitative leap up from the naive cargo-cult IQfy understanding, in terms of true literary pleasure. One thing that helped a lot for me was learning about Spengler's gestalt conception of cultures and their aesthetics, it helped me free myself from thinking that an aesthetic object was only valuable insofar as it was the expression of some individual genius, or insofar as it consciously, explicitly expounded some important idea.

You should read Johnson's Life of Richard Savage in Lives of the Poets, anon. Not much of a poet, Savage is only in there because he was Johnson's personal friend and Grub Street mentor. Truly a lovely if tragic piece. An homage to a friend, sweet reading.

Savage was such a perfectly representative figure for his time, a shameless man in a shameless age. I've read a few of his works because I was autistically interested in that period for a while. He's energetic and not without some unrefined talent, but he is totally devoid of any true depth of feeling, and all his "thoughts" are insincere posturing; I enjoyed reading it all the same though, but certainly far, far from essential unless you want a firsthand look at the era or at his eccentric life.

>But this is absolutely what must be had in your comment to the anon just before me!

Very good point, he is a particularly interesting case among the many minor writers who are helpful in illuminating the world of Augustan London - your Cibbers, your Haywoods, your Henry Careys, plus all the others who, while perhaps less colorful and memorable, still add their voices to complete the chorus.

Another fun Savage fact, he was the namesake for the Savage Club in the latter half of the 19th century, another strange and somewhat forgotten age in literature - the idea being that "If we accept Richard Savage as our godfather, it shows that there is no pride about us". All the same, the club went on to boast such prominent and disparate members as Wodehouse, Whistler, Charlie Chaplin, Earl Mountbatten, Dante Rossetti, Somerset Maugham, Captain Scott, Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Lord Kitchener, W.S. Gilbert, J.M. Barrie, Rachmaninov, Edward Elgar, and three successive kings of England. So I suppose Johnson did succeed after all in elevating him to a sort of immortality.

I haven't read it, my interest was too narrow to include that slightly later period - in fact I read the original Theobald version of the Dunciad rather than the Cibber one. I did read some secondary source that described some of his back-and-forth with Pope though, nothing particularly remarkable, just some lively jabs on the subject of sexual potency. But he certainly seems like a Savagesque early Georgian era con-man, a spiritual brotherhood that he shares with Macclesfield, Bolingbroke, Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard, the South Sea schemers and all their imitators, Mary Toft of rabbit-birth-hoax fame, Wharton and Ripperda who acted as Jacobite "ambassadors" to Spain, John James Heidegger the impresario of operas and masquerades, the king's mistress who perpetrated the Wood's halfpence scheme - a true rogues' gallery, populated by only the most worthless characters, with Walpole himself as the permissive, jolly and cordially corrupt master of ceremonies, while the ineffectual kings and pretenders sat and watched history pass them by.

I imagine owning a curiosity like that would make for a very fun conversation piece, I certainly wasn't buying the random stuff I read though, just using libgen, google books, archive, etc.

Walpole seems fun, ironically I've read a few of Robert Walpole's letters but never Horace's.

You should definitely go for the 1889 Nimmo edition, there's no better flex than spending $2000+ on a terrible book.

Pic