Cup-bearers of Wine and Hellebore

This collection of literary portraits moves from exuberant irreverence to deepening darkness, tracing some of the most distinctive voices in English and French letters. Llewelyn Powys's Rabelais emerges first as a fearless celebrant of bodily life, a monk-educated rebel whose boisterous comedy conceals moral seriousness, spiritual depth, and a fierce contempt for hypocrisy, censorship, and false restraint. Jonathan Swift follows as a brilliant, paradoxical satirist whose wit was sharpened by humiliation, patronage, and political struggle; his savage attacks on folly and pretension, his bitter Irish years, and his ruinous private grief culminate in a final descent into madness. Matthew Prior offers a lighter, more worldly counterpoint: a clever self-made diplomat-poet whose charm, opportunism, sensual verse, and financial maneuvering are balanced by flashes of moral gravity and a posthumous reputation marked by both elegance and scandal. The sequence closes with William Cowper, whose tender sensibility and poetic gifts are shadowed from the start by bullying, fear, and lifelong mental anguish. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.