ABSTRACT
Johnson and Cowper embodied their own age for many of their contemporaries, as certain writers do again and again in history. Of the two Johnson was decidedly the greater, and counts for more today; Cowper is often seen as a mere forerunner though this is both to misinterpret him and to do him injustice of the romantic writers, and particularly of Wordsworth. The eighteenth century has been commonly known as the 'Age of Reason', dominated as it was in its opening decades by Isaac Newton, one of the most influential of all European scientists. However, reason may induce scepticism, and scepticism can bite the tail of rationalism, stimulating a reaction against itself. The aim of Jane Austen own novels, and the function of her constant irony, is both to show how such self-regarding fictions can be undermined, and to undermine any tendency in her own readers to misuse hers.
