ABSTRACT
The Pursuits of Literature, in four dialogues, is a developing and increasingly irascible Juvenalian satire on politics and culture in the 1790s. The Pursuits of Literature, whether published as individual dialogues or together as a collection, appeared as the work of an anonymous author. For a long time authorship of the poem remained unknown, though it seems there were many that were privy to the writer’s identity. The satirist in Mathias’s view is not malign merely for the sake of malignity; on the contrary, he is the disinterested and impersonal guardian of ‘publick order, morality, religion, literature and good manners’ and The Pursuits of Literature is ‘delivered to the publick in this spirit’.
