Homage to Lancelot Andrewes

Abstract

This chapter undertakes the first sustained study of For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. Its differences from and similarities to the earlier The Sacred Wood and the later Essays Ancient and Modern, often considered largely a reprinting of For Lancelot Andrewes, help reveal a volume carefully constructed. The book does, indeed, treat “style and order,” representing Eliot’s move, which he had described in his critical commentary, as necessary from literature to cultural critique, but always proceeding in, through, and by means of the former. Extended analyses are offered of each of the eight essays collected in For Lancelot Andrewes, which consider, in order, Andrewes, John Bramhall, Machiavelli, Frank Herbert Bradley Baudelaire, Thomas Middleton, Richard Crashaw, and Irving Babbitt.