Since pleasure looks the lovelier in disguise

The stealth and frolic give a smarter gust.

And wit to vice and elegance to lust.

James Dance's "Cricket, An Heroic Poem" is more light hearted verse. This English fascination with the sport foreshadows America's own fixation with baseball: "They pleasures, cricket! All his heart control; They eager transports dwell upon his soul." After denouncing billiards, and cricket's sister sport tennis, Dance elevates cricket to a heroic level, emblemtic of London's proud, patriotic demeanor.

Of course London is not always so vaunted. Swift's "A Description of a City Shower" is a famous portrait of the rancid gutters, but James Eyre Week's vision of the grey fog of people, "Lost and bewildered in the thickening mist" presents the wen at its gloomist. Also intriguing are Hannah More and William Parsons' words on the tumuluous bred riots that swept the nation towards the end of the century. And Mary Alcock's "The Chimney Sweeper's Complaint" whisks in the industrial fervor.

My legs you see are burnt and bruised, My feet are galled by stones, My flesh for lack of food is gone, I'm little else but bones.

Much of the value of Lonsdale's book lies in the interesting people he introduces to us. A great concern among literary men of this time was the burden of the past the notion that earlier poets had expressed everything original that was to expressed about man and his existence, and had done it so well. While we do not associate the eighteenth century with the most prolitic periods of creative endeavour, it should be recalled that Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge were all children of the age. And although their craft may not be quite's scintillating as the more famous poets before and after their time, the minor poets Lonsdale has uncovered do add credence to the notion that as long as there is life there are always experiences for the fertile creative mind to commit to paper. Experiences that make fine reading. Edward King and Christopher Pitt will never be so celebrated as the Metaphysicals or the Romantics but they are significant because their ideas do project the country that impressed their minds. Lonsdale's will be a controversial book because he gives so much credence (and space) to rough hewn versifyers. Yet those willing to excuse slightly less than heroic couplets, and some jarring syntax will enjoy many agreeable hours of reading about people living in an age of transition