This essay had its beginning in an investigation of changing attitudes to seventeenth-century Pre-Restoration poetry during the English Romantic period. In the course of that research, Jane Campbell discovered that a relatively little-known periodical, the Retrospective Review, which was published in London from 1820 to 1828, appeared to have played an interesting part in the rehabilitation of the poets of the earlier period. This book, then, is an attempt to outline the history of this review, to place it against its literary background, and to assess its role in the critical re-evaluation of the poets of the earlier seventeenth century—an age to which the Retrospective’s contributors and their contemporaries looked with fascination as well as with an affectionate feeling of kinship.

Jane Campbell is professor emerita of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario and a specialist in Romantic literature. She taught from 1961 until her retirement in 1999, and in 1986, she was the recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award. She is the author [http:www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/campbell.shtml A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination] (WLU Press, 2004).

James Doyle is professor emeritus of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. Author of five other books, including The Fin de Siècle Spirit (1995), Stephen Leacock: The Sage of Orillia (1992), and [http:www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/doyle.shtml Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada], he has contributed many times to scholarly journals, particularly on Canadian-US literary relations and political radicalism in Canadian literature.

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