In praise of manly piety
Margaret Anne Doody, 9 June 1994
The 18th-Century Hymn in England
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 167 pp., £27.95, October 1993,0 521 38168 1 Show More
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 167 pp., £27.95, October 1993,
“... my eyelids close.’ It is not ‘strong’. That is in Davie’s eyes a major defect in a hymn. Philip Doddridge is too thin and tender: ‘Only in the last two lines of “O god of Bethel” does Doddridge achieve Watts’s strength, in the sense that the 17th and 18th centuries gave to that term, meaning resonant conciseness.’ But is ‘resonant ... ”