and late eighteenth-century verse. I have sought to trace the de-
velopment of these attitudes from their early beginnings. Part
One, therefore, is roughly chronological. The first chapter deals
largely with early eighteenth-century attitudes toward personifi-
cation, the second with mid-century developments, while chapter
V is concerned mainly with late eighteenth-century attitudes to-
ward the figure. Chapter III is devoted to a discussion of the fac-
tors responsible for the prevalence of the allegorical type of per-
sonification in eighteenth-century verse, while chapter IV
contains a critical evaluation of this device as it appears in the
verse of Collins and Gray.

Part Two begins with a discussion of attitudes toward poetry
held in common by Johnson and Pope, the most talented repre-
sentatives of a tradition which is found to differ significantly
from the poetic tradition described in Part One of the study. Part
Two is chiefly critical: I have sought to indicate the values which
personification may have when it is employed by poets whose
verse bears a more "serious relation to the life of its time" ⁹ than
does the verse of those poets considered in Part One.

Although I distinguish two different sorts of eighteenth-cen-
tury personification, I find that both types are formed under the
influence of those empirical theories of mind which determined
contemporary attitudes toward the nature and function of "rea-
son" and "imagination" in poetry. Chapter I, accordingly, is de-
voted to a discussion of these theories of mind in so far as they
are seen to affect eighteenth-century attitudes toward the personi-
fied abstraction as a product of "the Poet's Brain." ¹⁰

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