Cosmologia by Erasmus Darwin, edited by Stuart Harris, Harris, £8, ISBN 0954215109 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
ERASMUS DARWIN wrote in coupled rhyme/To please the learned public of his time./To read him now, with later, cooler eye,/Is somewhat harder, but it’s worth a try. After reading this tribute to the works of Charles’s grandfather, the rhythms he used tends to linger.
Darwin was a noted 18th-century physician, as well as a famous poet. Many people thought he was the greatest of his generation, which included William Cowper and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This selection from his seemingly inexhaustible flood of rhyming…
