ABSTRACT
The Jacobean malady was a consuming fear that things would fall apart. The primal Augustan terror is that things will merge. Indeed, the Great Chain of Being, which clanks its way monotonously through the history of ideas, is but the ontological expression of something far more deeply interfused in all Augustan life. The Augustan experience was stratified. Philosophers and poets agreed with social theorists on this point: it was common ground to Locke and Bolingbroke, Pope and Addison, Shaftesbury and Mandeville. A single book, not one of those considered safe for children, has arrogated to itself at least 80 per cent of modern criticism. The influential figures to begin with were French. Rene Rapin, for example, argued that the Goths had 'suffered their Wits to ramble in the Romantick Way' - the translation is that of Thomas Rymer (1674).
