In one of those gorgeous verbal doodles with which he filled the pages of his absorbing (and at the time quite illegal) wartime journal, Hugh Trevor-Roper tells us that he likes
Listening to solemn music, the stately and serene music of Handel; and walking, in May, through woods planted by 18th century dukes; and drinking fragrant morning-tea in bed, reading learned and elegant and worldly biographies about learned and elegant and worldly bishops.
Does this not all sound very agreeable? Even today it is possible to breathe the varied atmosphere of that age in its literature, and what refreshing air it is: the greatest practitioners of the novel, from Defoe, who invented the genre, to Richardson, who perfected it, Fielding, Sterne, the various Gothic scribblers; in verse, Pope, Gray and the early Romantics; in prose, Addison and Steele and of course Gibbon, who produced the most readable history ever written in ours or any language.
