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Anglican Confirmation, 1662–1820 by Phillip Tovey (review)

profile literature such as Cato, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Other contexts ignored are war and disease. Deaths due to the high frequency of war—the Jacobite rebellions, the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions, the Seven Years War, the American war, and the French wars of 1793–1815—certainly cast a national pall. And the high incidence of death by smallpox that in 1726 Voltaire estimated to be 20 percent (Letters on England, No. 11), and of many younger than six, also darkened the times. Churches in thousands of towns and villages featured the names of slain redcoats and Jack Tars on inscriptions inside and children’s names on small tombstones in their churchyards. Missing also from the anthology are two justifications. First, the book’s title dates: In thirty-four poems spanning 1693 to 1858 the questions shout: Why 1858? And how much later can the eighteenth century run? And second, the choice of poems is unexplained. Although Mr. van Leeuwen admits that ‘‘it would be wrong to classify any poem written in a graveyard, or concerning death, as a graveyard poem,’’ he fails to account for his selection. Of course, he includes the standard stock by the three parson-poets, Parnell’s ‘‘Night Piece on Death,’’ a bit of Young’s Night Thoughts, and Blair’s Grave; and, of course, he includes Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. But why does he include Poe’s ‘‘Spirits of the Dead’’ (1839) and E. B. Hale’s ‘‘O Bury Me Not’’ (1845)? And why does he not include William Collins’s eloquent ‘‘Ode Written at the Beginning of the Year 1746,’’ (‘‘How sleep the brave’’), a sonnet in hushed sibilants and somber assonance cut off at twelve lines to commemorate the lives of English soldiers similarly cut off during the Jacobite rebellion? And where is Charles Wolfe’s moving 1809 ‘‘Burial of Sir John Moore,’’ direct, spare, and laden with emotion and the respect of his soldiers? Perfect candidates for inclusion, these poems are set at gravesites and written during the standard ‘‘long’’ eighteenth century. Objections aside, Mr. van Leeuwen’s book is valuable for its resurrection of the graveyard poets in a compact edition of their work about life’s last stop. H. George Hahn Towson University