it appears in relation to the poetry of the century as a whole could
not be attained until these differences were clearly recognized.
This study, accordingly, attempts to set the personified abstrac-
tion against a background of poetic theory and practice which
shall be relevant to eighteenth-century verse in its larger aspects.

It is hoped that this book will be of some interest, not only to
specialists in the eighteenth century but to students of the roman-
tic period as well, and to others who may be concerned primarily
with the history of English poetics. Poetic figures of speech in-
evitably reflect the larger world of which they are a part, and
while I have been concerned with the personified abstraction and
"not another thing," I have not found it possible or desirable to
give an account of the figure without reference to topics of more
general interest.

It is assumed in this study that no figure of speech is good or
bad in itself, and that success or failure in the use of any literary
device cannot be predicated on the basis of a priori judgments
concerning the inherent value of the device itself. This may seem
to state the obvious, but during the nineteenth century and later
personification was condemned because it made for "abstract-
ness" in poetry, when poetry, it was felt, should deal only with
concrete particulars. This derogatory estimate of the figure is re-
flected in the criticism of Thomas Quayle, whose study of eight-
eenth-century poetic diction appeared in 1924. ¹ Later estimates,
such as that of B. H. Bronson, ² have been more favorable, but if
Quayle tends to condemn the figure as such, Bronson goes to the
other extreme. He leaves the impression that the values which he
properly finds in Johnson's use of the figure in the ode On the
Death of Mr. Robert Levet represent values which are inherent in
the figure itself. But, as E. R. Wasserman has pointed out, per-
sonification is "a device of art, not the product of art": ³ its
esthetic value depends upon its organic relation to the context in
which it appears. Wasserman's thoroughly detailed study is de-
voted to the purpose of discovering "some of the expectations
that personification excited in the mind of the eighteenth-century

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