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The Authority of Accidental Variants
in the Tonson Second Edition of Edward Young's Love of
Fame
by
James E. May
In preparing an edition of Edward Young's Love of Fame, I have encountered evidence that the author revised punctuation, capitalization, and italics throughout the 2534 lines of the satires for the Tonson octavo of 1728. These seven satires were first printed separately in folios entitled The Universal Passion from January 1725 to February 1728. They bear the imprint "Printed for J. ROBERTS in Warwick-Lane," yet the first five were entered in the Stationers' Company's Register to Jacob Tonson.[1] A month after the last was published, they were printed in octavo "for J. TONSON" (O1). Numerous ornaments shared between F1 and O1 suggest that the same printshop composed both editions.[2]
The title of O1 designates it "The SECOND EDITION Corrected, and Alter'd." Substantive changes in the text confirm Young's involvement: four lines moved, twenty-four lines removed, twelve lines and a preface added, and thirty changes in word and phrase, most of which are Young's. In addition to these changes, there is abnormal, indeed enormous, change in punctuation, decrease in capitals, and increase in italics. O1 has important textual consequences, for, with very few exceptions,[3] all subsequent editions of the satires derive from it. Rarely, at least for this period, has anyone made a strong case for an author's revision of accidentals in a revised reprint without
Since there is no external evidence about Young's revisions of F, the evidence that he revised his accidentals must come from the editions. The main reason for supposing Young revised accidentals involves the extensive and selective nature of the variants. As evidence that these changes far exceed the norm, we may compare them in number with the variants of the second and third Tonson octavos, published in 1730 and 1741 (O2, O3).[6] In O2's reprinting of O1, we find 3 changes to lower case, 14 to upper case, 29 in punctuation, 30 in spelling, 2 to roman font, and none to italic. In O3's reprinting of O2, we find added 6 changes to lower case, 8 to upper case, 15 in punctuation, 21 in spelling, 5 to roman font, and 1 to italic. The average of these variants for both reprintings is 4.5 changes to lower case, 11 to upper case, 22 in punctuation, 25.5 in spelling, 3.5 to roman font, and 0.5 to italic. In O1, by contrast, there are 152 changes involving 175 marks in punctuation, 667 to lower case, and 920 to italics. Moreover, there are qualitative differences in the two sets of variants. In O2 and O3 there is noticeably more movement to roman font and to upper case than to italic and to lower case; whereas, the reverse occurs in O1. O2 and O3's increase in upper case is typical of most reprints of the satires; for example, in the 1741 Works, published by Curll et al., which reprints O2, we find ten changes to upper case for every one to lower. Finally, in O2 and O3 there are far more compositorial errors in punctuation and spelling than in italics.
At times accidental changes can be assigned with probability to the author because they are found in great numbers near substantive changes that are clearly authorial. Unfortunately, there is no evidence in any of the twenty-two formes of O1 with poetic text that Young introduced the accidental changes while making substantive changes in the proofs. Inner and
per page with sub. var. | without sub. var. | |
Satire I | 12.5 | 14.0 |
II | 8.2 | 9.0 |
III | 7.7 | 8.3 |
IV | 8.6 | 10.7 |
V | 8.0 | 6.9 |
VI | 2.5 | 2.8 |
VII | 10.0 | 8.5 |
Since in O1 an extraordinary number of accidental changes are spread throughout, with equally distributed substantive changes, Young probably revised his accidentals. The question of exactly which changes in O1 are his remains, however. Professor Bowers has sketched a method for referring certain accidentals in the revised Folio edition of Jonson's Sejanus to the author. This method mimics the more commonly discussed process for assigning substantive changes to an author: identifying homogeneous classes of changes by consensus.[8] This argument from consistency of change is not so strong in O1 with accidentals as it is with substantives since each compositor behaves more systematically with accidentals than he does with substantives. The argument can be strengthened by considering whether these changes are typical of compositorial handiwork in unrevised editions. For instance, consistent movements to italics in O1 are likely to be authorial because,
There are 152 changes in syntactic punctuation, involving 175 marks, figures which do not include hyphens and apostrophes, which are more of the order of orthographic changes. The Tonsons' other octavos introduced so few punctuation changes that many of the 152 are probably authorial. This is perhaps also suggested by a rather high incidence of punctuation changes on pages with substantive changes. Of 29 pages with substantive change, 7 lack any punctuation change; whereas, of 129 pages of poetic text, 52 lack punctuation change. This means that only 24% of the pages with substantive alteration lack punctuation variants, but 40% of the total do. Young's involvement is further suggested by the fact that Satire VI, with almost one-quarter of the lines in the collected satires, has but seven punctuation changes, only one of which belongs to either class accepted as authorial.[9] Most likely, Young revised it apart from the other satires. The sudden decrease of punctuation variants in O1 when Satire VI begins does not correspond to a change in the formes set by compositors since it begins on I4. And, were the alterations primarily compositorial, we would expect them to occur more proportionately throughout the satires.
Only two classes of punctuation changes appear to be authorial: both involve commas primarily within the line. Given the great critical concern for the caesura, which is largely emphasized by punctuation, it seems likely that compositors would be careful to preserve it, certainly more so than with external punctuation. Furthermore, at the line-end, where independent clauses commonly conclude, five different punctuation marks may be appropriate and have little effect upon the reading. But internally nothing may be appropriate but a comma, as for parenthesizing a prepositional phrase. In general, punctuation changes at the line-end have almost no effect on rhythm or speech accent, for they usually entail the replacement of one mark for another, and the sense and syntax close off at least half the lines. But changes in internal punctuation do not usually involve replacement but the introduction and removal of commas, and they have a rhetorical effect. Thus, it stands to reason, and some evidence can be found to support
The two classes of internal punctuation that I find authorial are the introduction of a comma after the first word or phrase of a compound and the introduction or completion of parenthetic commas. The commas inserted in compounds involve marks like that after 'vice' in the line "All friends to vice, and folly are thy foes" (II.6). Not surprisingly, aside from within the first foot, these commas usually appear between feet. The comma-pause within compounds seems to be an idiosyncracy of Young's, occurring often in F and also in his Two Epistles to Mr. Pope (1730) and his correspondence; this pointing is frequently deleted in later reprints. The parenthetic commas are introduced around prepositional phrases, appositives, and adverbial and adjectival clauses. For instance, in F the line "And to this cost another must succeed" (II.89) lacks any pause; but in O1 commas were introduced after 'And' and 'cost' to create a word accent which slightly counterpoints the regular verse accent. There are some comma insertions that create pauses before surprising and antithetical words, which I have not accepted since they are not truly parenthetic. Although these offer similarly useful guidance to the reader, they are not abundant enough to treat as a class.[11] Six of the parenthetic changes involve marks at the line endings; however, in five of these cases, the external comma is introduced with an internal one.[12] Totalled, there are 49 parenthetic changes involving 72 marks, and 30 compound changes. The high incidence of these changes, 79 of 152 punctuation variants, with other internal marks being negligible, further argues their authority.
That Young expanded his use of italics for emphasizing common names is not so surprising as it may seem. Since verse satire closely approximates colloquial, dramatic speech, poets and printers recognized that it needed more italics than other kinds of publications.[13] To facilitate the reader's
More significantly, italics frequently influence the sense of the lines, often giving words a more pointed signification. For example, in Satire II's ridicule of Codrus' pretensions to learning through a library he never reads, Young wrote:
Inform the world what Codrus would be thought;
And, to this cost, another must succeed,
To pay a Sage, who says that he can read. (ll. 87-90)
There is a growing body of evidence that poets of Young's day cared for their accidentals and that, in particular, they underlined their manuscripts to determine italics and later revised accordingly. Pope's holographs of "An Essay on Pastorals," Epistle to Bathurst, and Essay on Criticism all contain underlining to indicate italics, and the underlining in the last, which served as printer's copy for the first edition, determines almost all the italicized words in the printed text.[15] There are two poetic holographs reprinted in Young's correspondence, both of which contain underlining, showing that he too wished to determine what common names would receive rhetorical emphasis.[16] The italics changes in the revised editions of Thomson's poems, in particular his Winter, cannot be explained with references to the habits of compositors.[17] Matthew Prior complained in his letters of spending months over the "commas, semicolons, italics, and capitals" of his Poems on Several Occasions (1718),[18] which Monroe K. Spears and H. Bunker Wright accordingly chose as copy-text for poems previously printed. Although the empirical evidence presented here is not that extensive, it does refer to the practice of Young's peers in poetry. Moreover, common sense suggests that a compositor was not likely to introduce italics in a reprint, for, being paid by piece-work,[19] he would unnecessarily lessen his wages if he tried to determine what else to italicize and his eye would not likely mistake roman type in a roman text for italic.
The main reason some scholars had assumed that compositors determined capitals and italics involves their frequent variation in editions of the same
Of the particular arguments for the authority of the italics introduced in O1, the foremost is their extraordinary frequency: 920 common names are italicized. None of the twenty-one reprintings before 1765 which descend from O1 introduces more than a dozen. A related argument for the italics' authority involves their permanence once introduced. Consider the italic variants found in the duodecimo Works of 1765, five reprintings away from O1.[23] A collation of this 1765 edition with O1 discovers that, after the text has passed through five different houses, twenty-six words have been erroneously placed in roman but only four in italic type. With the exception of two editions in 1750 and two others that descend from them, which eschew
One of the strongest arguments for the authority of these new italics derives from their progressive increase in the folios and O1. A new heavily italicized style does not suddenly appear in 1728, a fact which reduces the possibility that Young or the house hired someone to make alterations for O1. The first five satires published, I—IV and The Last, were written and conceived earlier than V and VI and were published from January 1725 to January 1726. In these satires, where an average of 41 words per satire (excluding proper names) are italicized, italic type is used sparingly for emphasis. But in Satire V, published in February 1727, and in VI, published in February 1728, italics for accentuation substantially increase. We find 204 words italicized in Satire V and 156 in VI. These are longer poems, but, if we reduce these figures in proportion to the 290 lines of Satire I, we would still have 103 and 74 italicized common names for Satires V and VI. Consequently, a month after the folio of Satire VI was published, when the satires were reprinted in O1, italics increased dramatically only in the first five satires published: there are 120 changes to italics in Satire I, 132 in II, 136 in III, 187 in IV, 79 in The Last, 196 in V, and 70 in VI. One way of dramatizing this change is to note that in the folio of The Last there is one word in italics for every eight lines, in the folio of V there is one for every three lines, and in O1 as a whole there is one for every one-and-a-half lines. A related fact—which supports the hypothesis that Young himself added the italics—is that the new and revised substantives of O1 are often italicized and lines added all contain italics for emphasis.[25]
As Bronson perceived,[26] and as the statistics in Table I indicate, this is a complex change involving an increase in italics along with a concomitant decrease in capitals. In Satire IV of O1, 66 words were revised to lower case and 187 to italic in its 260 lines, but, in Satire V of O1, only 89 words were revised to lower case and 196 to italic in almost twice as many lines. Also,
Table I
The following table indicates the changes in capitals and italics in O1. Column one indicates the number of lines shared by F and O1. Columns two and three list
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
I, 286 | 55 | 120 | 331 | 248 | 117 |
II, 290 | 47 | 132 | 121 | 80 | 74 |
III, 284 | 58 | 136 | 47 | 33 | 29 |
IV, 260 | 16 | 187 | 105 | 66 | 65 |
Last, 234 | 31 | 79 | 145 | 150 | 66 |
V, 574 | 204 | 196 | 127 | 89 | 49 |
VI, 606 | 156 | 70 | 36 | 1 | 1 |
--- | --- | --- | --- | ||
Total: | 567 | 920 | 667 | 401 | |
lines shared | ital. words in F | newly ital. words in O1 | u.c. in ll. 1-200 of F | words changed to l. c. in O1 | u.c. roman words changed to l.c. italics in O1 |
the folio with the least indiscriminate and emphatic capitalization, Satire III, with only 47 words capitalized in its first 200 lines, received far fewer changes to lower case, 33, than did that with the most capitalization, Satire I, with 331 words capitalized in its first 200 lines, which received 248 changes to lower case. Thus, many figures that stand out as exceptions to the progressive replacement of capitals with italics reflect the inconsistent capitalization for emphasis in F. Only when F is revised, did the satires receive a coherent accidental style.
The authority of O1's 667 revisions to lower case is best considered within the context of these italics changes. In Young's poems before the satires, as in Pope's early poetry, nearly all substantives are capitalized. The folio of Satire I has that older style of capitalization, although it has been modified such that important verbs and adjectives are capitalized and less important substantives, especially in lines with several capitalized words, are in lower case. In all the later satires, capitalization is largely emphatic and most substantives are not capitalized. Although the more abstract and panegyrical Satire The Last breaks the pattern, we can see from the figures in column 4 of the table that Young progressively capitalized fewer common names. Capitalized substantives are especially rare in F's Satire VI, less than two for every dozen lines. Thus, O1's great decrease in capitalization, like the increase in italics, is part of a stylistic evolution and does not suggest the sudden interruption of a compositor or corrector. If the italics changes are Young's—and the evidence strongly argues that they are—then why not suppose that Young also felt the need to revise his capitals?
When Young introduced italics for emphasis, he would have reviewed all the emphatic devices and seen that he needed to decrease the capitals to prevent the text from being overloaded with accentual devices. Accordingly, we find that 401 of the changes to lower case also involve changes to italics. Virtually all the capitalized verbs and most of the capitalized adjectives
The authority of the lower-case changes in O1 can be further argued on other grounds. Since he had abandoned the old style of capitalizing substantives after Satire I of F, Young probably would have changed to lower case the 131 capitalized words of that satire which are placed in lower case but not italicized. If we substract these changes and the 401 involving substitution of lower-case italics for upper-case roman from the total number of changes to lower case (667), we still have 135 changes. This figure is itself unusually high when compared to the 4.5 average changes in the other Tonson octavos. Also, the reduction to lower case of a single word and the raising to upper case of only three words in O1's reprinting of Satire VI argues strongly that the compositor was not regularizing capitalization. Parenthetically, putting aside the question of authority, an editor could accept the changes to lower case on the basis of Greg's belief that an edition should reflect the accidentals of its author's day.[28] To accept the italics of O1 while keeping the prolix capitals of F would produce a bastard accidental style that no compositor ever did or would impose.
In summary, I would accept as authorial the italics changes in the revised O1 edition of Love of Fame for a variety of reasons: the general interest in accidentals among major poets and the willingness of compositors to respect their intentions, Young's underlining in his holographs to determine italics for emphasis, the extraordinary increase in italics within O1, the permanence of these italics once introduced, and their progressive increase throughout F and O1. Although a few of the italics changes might well be compositorial, it would be, to borrow a phrase from Greg, "injudicious to make the attempt" to separate these variants from Young's revisions.[29] The same caveat applies to the changes to lower case and in internal comma pointing that have also been attributed to Young.
Notes
Full bibliographical descriptions of the editions referred to in this essay are available in my "Critical, Reader's Edition of Edward Young's Satiric Poetry: Love of Fame and Two Epistles to Mr. Pope" (Diss. Maryland, 1981), as is publication information, although much of the latter is more conveniently found in David Foxon's English Verse 1700-1750 (1975), I, 919-920. Collations of at least six copies of each of the folios and of the Tonson octavo of 1728 form the inductive basis of this study.
For instance, the ornament of a flower-basket flanked by perched birds (77 x 36.5 mm.) on the title pages of F's Satires I, II, and V occurs as the tail-piece to Satire III in O1.
The only editions subsequent to O1 but not derived from it are eclectic editions of Satires V and The Last, printed by Stephen Powell for George Ewing, Dublin, 1728, and of Satire I, also printed by Powell for Ewing, in 1731 (all three of which impose substantive changes from O1 upon F's accidentals), and the first satire of the Foulis edition of 1758, which descends from Powell's 1731 edition.
Charles E. Frank, "Edward Young's Satires: Materials for an Edition of Love of Fame (Diss. Princeton, 1939), pp. 42-43.
Bertrand Bronson, Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (1958), p. 16. This argument on the propriety of italics to sense, on which both Frank and Bronson entirely rely, perhaps underestimates the abilities of the premier printers that poets like Young engaged for important editions.
Foxon's English Verse 1700-1750 lists the 1730 and 1741 octavos as Y171 and Y173 (I, 921-922). These editions share many ornaments with O1; for instance, the heron headpiece of O1's Satire III recurs in O2's Satire I and O3's Preface and Satire II.
The following are the number of lines with accidental variants in each forme of O1 (formes Go [outer], Hi [inner], and Mo lack substantive variants): Bi, 57; Bo, 77; Ci, 46; Co, 58; Di, 51; Do, 39; Ei, 41; Eo, 42; Fi, 66; Fo, 59; Gi, 45; Go, 44; Hi, 38; Ho, 29; Ii, 18; Io, 22; Ki, 27; Ko, 20; Li, 8; Lo, 7; Mi, 61; Mo, 52. These 907 lines with accidental changes are distributed, with the exception of Satire VI, fairly evenly throughout the seven satires. About one-third to one-half of the lines in the other six satires are altered, as can be seen by comparing the total number of lines changed with the number of lines shared by F and O1 for each satire: Satire I has 171 of 286 lines altered, II has 112 of 290, III has 107 of 284, IV has 137 of 260, V has 189 of 574, VI has 65 of 606, and The Last has 116 of 234.
The only accepted punctuation variant in O1's Satire VI is a parenthetic comma after 'uncontroul'd' in the lines: "By wealth unquench'd, by reason uncontroul'd, / For ever burns her sacred thirst of gold" (VI.289-290). Since Young did not make systematic comma changes, nor case changes, in Satire VI, it might be best accepted as an editorial emendation. However, four words italicized in lines 282 and 293 of O1 argue that he may well have introduced it.
A glance over the apparatus of the California Dryden shows that unauthorized reprints add a dozen end-line punctuation variants for each change within the line. In The Medal, for instance, where there are over half as many lines with internal marks as there are with external, several unrevised reprints introduced but four changes of syntactical punctuation within the 322-line text and over sixty changes at the line endings. (The Works of John Dryden, eds. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., and Vinton Dearing [1972], II, 427-428). Also, the great majority of punctuation changes in O2 and O3 occur at the line ends.
For instance, a comma is inserted in O1 between the following verb and its infinitive of reason, as if to underline an implicit antithesis: "why will you starve, to be admired?" (IV.186).
The five parenthetic commas at the line ends that are inserted as part of a set occur at I.86, I.234-235, IV.181, VI.31-32, and V.173-74. The sixth, introduced singly, occurs at VI.289 and is discussed in footnote 9.
For instance, the printer Philip Luckombe wrote that italic type should "be used for such purposes as it was designed for; viz. . . . for words, terms, or expressions . . . by which they [authors] intend to convey to the reader either instructing, satyriżing, admiring, or other hints and remarks" (my italics; A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing [1770], p. 235). The satirists of the period make frequent use of italics. James Bramston italicized 100 common names in the first 243 lines of The Art of Politics (1729) and James Miller italicized 328 in the first 400 lines of his Harlequin-Horace (1731). Bramston's use of italics is proportional to Young's in Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, where 195 common names are italicized in 628 lines, and Miller's use is proportional to Young's in Love of Fame (O1), where two words are italicized for every three lines. Irony, so prevalent in satire and troublesome to many eighteenth-century readers, seems to have particularly required italics. Jacob Viner has noted that Edward Capell, in the Preface to Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry (1760), urged that dots be placed above ironic passages for greater clarity, arguing, "there seem'd to be much want of a particular note of punctuation to distinguish irony, which is often so delicately couch'd as to escape the notice of even the attentive reader" (The Augustan Milieu, ed. H. K. Miller et al. [1970], p. 81).
Consider the effect of italics in the following lines:
And the last word is her eternal right. (V.82)
Maynard Mack reprints "An Essay on Pastoral" in "Pope's Pastoral," The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 12 (1980), 85-161; see p. 102 where the word 'Italic' is written in the margin next to underlined words. See also Earl H. Wasserman's Pope's 'Epistle to Bathurst': A Critical Reading with an Edition of the Manuscript (1960), pp. 76-77, and Robert M. Schmitz's Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' 1709: A Study of the Bodleian Manuscript Text with Facsimiles, Transcripts, and Variants (1962).
One poem is a dedication of the satires to the Duke of Chandos, and the other, reprinted from the Monthly Magazine of 1 April 1816, is Young's revision of The Foreign Address; see The Correspondence of Edward Young, ed. Henry Pettit (1971), pp. 59-60 and 426-428. Accentual italics are rare but do occur in other poetic holographs reprinted by Pettit on pp. 16-17, 140 and 154.
In N. Blandford's second-edition reprinting (O1) of the Roberts folio (F) of Winter, there are both italic and substantive changes. While the second-edition O1 preserves all the italics of F, it places ten old words and introduces 32 new words in italics. Then, in O5 (1728), also by Blandford, new lines are added and 73 words italicized in F and O1 are romanized. When O5 is reprinted with lines added in the subscription quarto (Q1) and an octavo (O6) in 1730, none of O5's words are newly italicized or romanized. If we attribute the increase in italics in O1 and, paradoxically, their decrease in O5 to Blandford's compositor, how can we explain the identical use of italics in lines shared by O5, O6, and Q1?
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calender of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, III (1908), 454; on Prior's care for his accidentals, see also pp. 455 and 459-460. On Spears and Wright's choice of copy-text, see The Literary Works of Matthew Prior (1959), I, xlviii-xlix; and Wright's "Ideal Copy and Authoritative Text: The Problem of Prior's Poems on Several Occasions (1718)," Modern Philology, 49 (1952), 234-235.
On the piece-work wages of compositors during the handpress period, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), pp. 54-55 and 172-173.
Both the old orthodoxy and the emerging position are reflected in Bronson's remark, "I have seen no evidence to support Geoffrey Tillotson's hypothesis that in the time of Pope capitalization was even loosely—still less 'rigorously'—dependent upon format" (Printing as an Index of Taste, p. 17). That the increase of italics in O1 is not due to format convention can be seen from the fidelity of Dublin and Edinburgh octavo reprintings of F. In the first Edinburgh editions of Satires I-IV and The Last (Foxon's Y138, Y140, Y142, Y144, and Y146 [English Verse 1700-1750, I, 920]), there are but seven words changed to roman and none to italic. No italics are introduced in the many Dublin editions from 1725-27 (Foxon's Y149-54, Y156-58, Y160-61, Y163, and Y165).
In reviewing these lectures, Nicolas Barker remarked that "It is fascinating to discover Pope using the 'simpler' mode [that with less typographical emphasis] for the Homer subscribers' text (who were assumed to be cognoscenti) while using a fuller range for the popular editions; evidently Pope felt the vulgar needed such help to grasp every nuance" of his text ("Pope and his Publishers," TLS, 3 September 1976, p. 1085). See also Foxon's suggestion that Pope's revision of accidentals for revised reprints may have been a practice so common among poets that "In cases like those of Cowley and Crabbe, where second editions add stress either by capitalizing selected nouns or by the use of italic," the "changes should be considered authorial unless proved otherwise" (Greg's 'Rationale' and the Editing of Pope," The Library, 5th ser., 33 [1978], 123).
Phyllis J. Guskin, "Intentional Accidentals: Typography and Audience in Swift's Drapier's Letters," Eighteenth-Century Life, VI, NS 1 (October, 1980), 81. Guskin does not study revised editions but notes that works intended for different audiences were issued with different degrees of italicization.
The Works of the Reverend Edward Young, LL.D., 4 vols. (1765); the accidental texture of this edition derives from O1 through O2 (Tonson, 1730), Works 1741 (Curll, et al.), Works 1752 (a duodecimo "London"), and Robert Urie's duodecimo, issued in a Works and singly (Glasgow, 1755).
An octavo printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis (Glasgow, 1750) and an octavo "Printed for J. WATTS," probably a Scottish piracy ("London," 1750), have no italic type in the Preface or the satires. An octavo of 1753 (n.p.), which follows the Foulis' readings, and an octavo printed for J. James (London, 1762), which follows Watts', necessarily lack O1's italic, nor do they introduce any on their own initiative.
In O1 new words in italics are substituted for old words in roman at I.251, II.140, II.144, III.143, III.163, IV.110, V.126, V.404 (two new words italicized for two old), VI.531, VII.148, and VII.237. Italicized words also occur in new lines added: IV.65-66, IV.247-248, VI.389-390, VI.393-394, and VII.155-158.
Bronson wrote that in O1 Young "avoids unnecessary capitals but, to even matters, indulges in a rhetorically rib-nudging, eyebrow-raising, winking-and-blinking use of italics to a degree seldom seen" (Printing as an Index of Taste, p. 16).
Two poems Young published in 1726-27 offer parallel evidence that he was moving toward greater use of italics for emphasis. The Instalment (printed for J. Walthoe, 1726) is full of italics for rhetorical emphasis: a total of 103 words on 70 of the poem's 160 lines are italicized. And Cynthio (printed for J. Roberts, 1727) has 151 common names italicized on 97 of the 184 lines of the poem.
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