“…Callanan sets crucial aspects of Mandeville's intellectual character into sharper relief: his medical background and his first-hand observation of the complex interplay between the physical, psychological and societal factors that determine well-being; his medical treatment of women and his acute analyses of their vulnerability in society; his particular literary sensibility and his uncanny grasp of the psychology of the reader; his keen understanding of the unprecedented political situation in England at the time, where the interests of Whigs and Tories, court and country, Protestant and Catholic, businessman and aristocrat, vied in increasingly complex combinations; and, above all, his philosophical inheritance from figures such as Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Bayle, and La Rochefoucauld"--…”

“…By analyzing the satiric fictions of the precursors of the Augustans, the author reveals the elements they bequeathed to those who rode the high crest of the satiric wave in England, before the art of satire became submerged in the deepening trough of sentimental romanticism.Paulson shows the Tories Dryden, Pope, and Swift and the Whigs Addison and Steele to be the heirs of a long line of satirists ancient and modern, from Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius to Rabelais, Cervantes and the English Elizabethan and Civil War poets. …”

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