if we have to classify Montagu as mediocre in terms both of the substance of his political and historical opinions and of the intellectual equipment he brought to bear upon those opinions, then we are immediately confronted by the more stubborn and disturbing problem of explaining the durability of his book. After all, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks had at least a walk-on part in the three great crises of the later eighteenth century: the Seven Years’ War, the War of American Independence, and the French Revolution. Montagu’s book illustrates that intriguing truth, that often in human affairs the most important causes are advanced by means of the most ordinary instruments.
David Womersley
[print edition page xxviii]
Biographical
Anon. Memoirs of the late Edw. W______ly M______tague, esq., 2 vols. London, 1779.
Coates, H. The British Don Juan. London, 1823.
Curling, J. Edward Wortley Montague. 1713–1776: The Man in the Iron Wig. London: A. Melrose, 1954.
Grundy, I. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kenealy, E. V. H. Edward Wortley Montagu, an Autobiography. 3 vols. London, 1869.
[Lamberg, Maximilien, comte de]. Mémorial d’un mondain. Nouvelle édition, 2 vols. London, 1776.
Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary. The Complete Letters. Edited by Robert Halsband. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67.
Historical and Contextual
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Blackburne, Francis. Memoirs of Thomas Hollis. 2 vols. London, 1780.
Brown, Peter. The Chathamites. London: Macmillan, 1967.
[print edition page xxix]
Clark, J. C. D. The Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the Mid-1750s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
________ (ed.). The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1742–1763. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Corbett, Sir Julian Stafford. England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy. 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1907.
Forbes, Duncan. Hume’s Philosophical Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Mackay, R. F. Admiral Hawke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Marston, Daniel. The Seven Years’ War. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001.
McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Pimlico, 2004.
Middleton, Richard. The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Pares, Richard. War and Trade in the West Indies 1739–1763. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
Parker, H. T. The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937.
Pearce, Edward. Pitt the Elder: Man of War. London: The Bodley Head, 2010.
Peters, Marie. Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Richard, Carl J. The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Rodger, N. A. M. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815. London: Allen Lane, 2004.
Rosebery, Lord. Chatham: His Early Life and Connections. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1910.
Sacks, Jonathan. Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Walpole, Horace. Memoires of the Last Ten Years of George the Second, 2 vols. London, 1822.
[print edition page xxx]
Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks was first published in 1759; there was a second edition in 1760 “with additions and corrections,” a third in 1769, and a fourth in 1778. On the continent, there was an English edition published in Basle in 1793, and an interesting French translation published in Paris in 1793 (concerning which see appendix A below and the introduction, p. xxv above). An American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1806.
The additions and corrections made for the second edition consisted of some slight changes of wording and the inclusion of additional footnotes, some of which responded to the reviews of the first edition (see appendix B below). In all, some eight extra pages of text were added in 1760.
The copy text for this edition is the fourth edition of 1778, which seems to have been more carefully printed than either the second or the third and which incorporates the revisions made in 1760. Page numbers from the 1778 edition have been inserted throughout the text of this edition in square brackets. Montagu’s numbered reference marks have been changed to superscript letters and moved from the beginning of his references to the end of the sentences or clauses; his two symboled notes remain as they were. Michel’s numbered footnote has been changed to a symboled note. All numbered notes in this edition are editorial.
[print edition page xxxi]
| Anderson, Crucible of War | Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). |
| Bacon, Advancement | Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). |
| Barrell, Survey | John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983). |
| Bennett, Tory Crisis | G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). |
| Blackburne, Memoirs | Francis Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 2 vols. (London, 1780). |
| [print edition page xxxii] | |
