Marilyn Butler is at least as great a literary historian as Ann Douglas, and that means as great as it gets. This book is... well, I do not say an object lesson in writing history, for it is inimitable. Dr.Butler's mind is vast: she can be just and sympathetic both to the stern Toryism of Jane Austen and to the extreme progressivism of Blake or Godwin. Her eye for the peculiarities of a period - even a period that lasted, perhaps, only a few months - is flawless. Her learning is enormous, yet worn lightly; like her Oxford predecessor C.S.Lewis, she can be said to have "read everything, and understood what [she] read". And because her knowledge is so broad, embracing political and social history on both Britain and the continent, she is able to indulge in the wholesale slaughter of sacred cows without being in the least affected, self-indulgent, or attention-seeking. It is simply her sacrifice to the truth. Dr.Butler on the real intellectual origins and significance of Wordsworth, for instance, is a marvellous liberation from generations of nonsense; as soon as one reads her analysis of his derivation from a specific and identifiable strand of eighteenth-century writing, one becomes conscious that this is the truth. And her style is worthy of her content: plain, profound, readable, with not one sentence in the whole book that does not advance the argument or shed further light. Dr.Butler is an Oxford Don, and this is the Oxford manner at its best - clear, unpretentious, comprehensive. This is a fabulously good book, that takes its place alongside Lewis' OXFORD HISTORY OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, Auerbach's MIMESIS, Ann Douglas' TERRIBLE HONESTY and THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE as one of the finest pieces of literary history I have ever read.