...Marilyn Roberts During the long eighteenth century, benevolence was thought to be the greatest of all virtues. In her later novels especially, Jane Austen emphasized its primacy, showing that benevolence must be taught, practiced, and perfected through rigorous self-analysis and the repudiation...

.... In The Task and several other works, Cowper depicts himself as a benevolent caretaker who generously provides shelter, food, and protection for his apparently grateful pet hares, but this representation of pet keeping coexists uneasily with the more skeptical and impartial accounts of interspecies hospitality...

... to imagine and promote an idea of civil society governed by norms of a benevolent “politeness.” One function of the new culture of politeness was to reconcile readers to the massive increase in military activity. This essay will explore the process of reconciliation in the two most influential periodicals...

..., in general, and the law of contracts, in particular, reorient drama away from the rights of the liberal subject, autonomously imagined, toward renewed conceptions of the social good, and the ethics of the community, replacing regulatory frameworks with emancipatory dispensations, in the benevolent comic...

...: it is indistinguishable from love or benevolence, as those qualities are rationally conceived and directed (Politi- cal Justice, 620). It is the Golden Rule. I count forty-two uses of “generous” and six of “generosity” in the third edition of Political Justice. In St. Leon, “generous”’ occurs forty-nine times...

... invective toward the dual targets of the theatrical fund and the avaricious actor/manager Garrick, the farce implies that Garrick used the fund to create a mask of benevolence that only barely obscured his miserly ambition, a charge that followed him far beyond the farce itself; his management...

... in Britain — in the benevolent deism of Thomson, the bourgeois morality of Richardson, the 120 Eighteenth-Century Life reformist novels of Sarah Scott and Sarah Fielding, or the comic-erotic aes- thetics of Sterne — determines how one defines its longer trajectory. For Nagle, sensibility begins...

... is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled?6 Edgeworth, abashed, wrote back, The Correspondence between M. Edgeworth and R. M. Lazarus 3 3 Your polite, benevolent and touching letter has given me much pleasure...

... matters is not what Adams preaches, or believes, or even thinks, but what he does. Or, to put this a little more technically, what counts is not knowledge or faith or representations, but, in particular, the practice of a virtue: charity—where that involves not just benevolence but also practical...

... hundred men (Works, 2:543). Thomas Keymer remarks that rather than exempli- fying selfless and heartfelt benevolence, Toby s war- gaming in the gar- den shows him to be grossly defective in fellow feeling. 25 Whether or not Keymer deliberately echoes Smith s compound, fellow- feeling, Sterne does seem...

... The Benevolent Planters, published and performed (if only twice) in 1789. In this short, musical play, the prologue promotes abolition, while the plot closes disappointingly with grateful African slaves lauding their kindly European masters. How refreshingly fair-minded is Thelwall’s notion that worthy...

... that of benevolent physician, to charlatan, to toyman, and finally, to entrepreneur. Sloane thus serves as an index to the changes in the history of collecting. By the eighteenth century, collecting had become endemic to British culture. In the medieval period, churches frequently housed small museums...

...) the reputation for solving the problem of scurvy. One of the reasons that books about Cook keep being written is that he is a fi gure encrusted with myths: the myth of his conquest of scurvy, the myth of his benevolence toward indigenous peoples, the myth of his role as active agent of empire...

... it is through “virtue” — ​which Nettleton associates with “benevolence” and that which is “beneficial to mankind in general” — ​that we can achieve “the greatest pleasure” and “most substantial happiness” we are capable of (260). Nettleton’s long forgotten Treatise offers a fascinating example of Epi...

... from the benevolence and good humor of Sheridan’s Lucius O’Trigger or Dennis O’Bryen’s A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed (1783)   2 0 1 Richard Cumberland’s Major O’Flaherty.56 A malevolent usurer, Ragan is a throwback to the pernicious, stage Irishman of the early decades of the century...

... of community, as Mr. Spectator has imbibed some of the country ethos of tightly con- nected, familial association. Mr. Spectator, though identifying with the justice s benevolence, transcends simple absorption or imitation of the bar- onet s techniques of judgment to ask how he himself would proceed given...

... of unaffected piety and matured wisdom” (Vindication, p. 18) and to be “equally loved for the piety and benevolence of the Christian as respected for the dignity and elevation of the philosopher” (Romance, p. 245). Nor is it purely accidental that Adeline’s true father displays...

... in Hartleyan principles of benevo- lence. In the introduction to the History,Priestley repeats David Hartley’s advice in the Observations on Man (1749) that “benevolence and piety are our only true guides” into natural philosophy.14 A committed vegetarian who took seriously the possibility of the animal...

... or economic rank, he was implying, consistent with Douglas s own description, that the poor child would be more fully human and free with the achievement of full literacy. Such simple benevolence does not seem especially transcen- dent and ethereal. Notwithstanding these faults, Work in Hand should alert...

... these throughout to issues of ambivalence and affirmation. He shows how France, throughout colonial and postcolonial history, will be torn between its benevolent, liberal impulses, religious at first, then humanitarian, and its desire to conquer and profit. Eighteenth-Century Life...