Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 176090

By John Regan

‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography between 1760 and 1790. These were the decades of Hugh Blair’s ‘Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal’ (1763) and ‘Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ (1783), Thomas Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’ (1765), Adam Ferguson’s ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ (1767) and Lord Monboddo’s ‘Of the Origin and Progress of Language’ (1774). In these texts and many more, verse is examined for what it can tell the historian about the progress of enlightened man to civil society. By historicizing poetry, these theorists used it as a lens through which we might observe our development from savagery to ‘polish’, with oral verse often cited as proof of the backwardness or immaturity of man from which he has awoken.

‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ deepens our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian and prosodic texts from these decades. In five case studies, this volume demonstrates how verse was employed to deliver deeply ambivalent reports on human progress. In this pre-‘Romantic’, pre-‘Utilitarian’ age, those reading verse with an eye to what it could convey about the journey towards the Enlightenment Republic of letters were in fact telling stories as subtle and ambiguous as the rhythms of the verse being read. Rather than focusing on a limited set of particular poets, ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ pays close attention to the theories of versification which were circulating in the later anglophone eighteenth century. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, this book shows how the poetic line becomes a site at which one may make assertions about human development even as one may observe and appreciate the expressive effects of metred language.

The central contention of ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of historical narratives of progress, but that attention to the particular characteristics of verse (rhythm and metre, line endings, stress contours, rhyme, etc.) had a kind of agency – it crucially reshaped – historical knowledge in the time. ‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ is a sustained assertion that poetry makes appeals to what was known as one’s ‘taste’, exerting aesthetic forces, and by so doing mediating one’s understanding of human development. It claims that this mediation has a special shape and force that has never undergone sufficient exploration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087747

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Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790

Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790

John Regan

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© John Regan 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-772-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-772-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One: The Cultural Logic of Progress

Part Two: Elocutionary Poetics in the Context of ‘Taste’

1.Progress by Prescription

2.Thomas Sheridan and the Divine Harmony of Progress

Part One: Harmony Articulated

Part Two: From Disinterestedness to the Divine

3.‘There Is a Natural Propensity in the Human Mind to Apply Number and Measure to Every Thing We Hear’: Monboddo, Steele and Prosody as Rhythm

Part One: Monboddo’s Theory of Linguistic Progress

Part Two: Steele’s Emphasis

Part Three: Rhythm as Prosody

4.‘[C]‌ut into, distorted, twisted’: Thomas Percy, Editing and the Idea of Progress

Part One: The Stadial Antiquarian

Part Two: Prosody as Pressure Point

5.‘Manners’ and ‘Marked Prosody’: Hugh Blair and Henry Home, Lord Kames

Afterword: Rude Manners, ‘Stately’ Measures: Byron and the Idea of Progress in the New Century

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

3.1Page 24 of Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis

3.2Page 77 of Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis

3.3Page 75 of Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis

3.4Page 76 of Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Marie, John and Lucy Regan for their kindness and support throughout the research and writing of this book.

My debt to academic colleagues and contemporaries is considerable and acknowledged at various points in the body of the text, but some special mention is warranted here also. Richard Bradford of the University of Ulster provided a model of attention to the turbulent world of eighteenth-century poetics. On the aesthetics of verse my thinking has been shaped by Peter de Bolla and Simon Jarvis at the University of Cambridge. Finally, I could not have asked for more generous readers than Corinna Russell and Philip Connell.

Chapter 4 of this book is a revised version of an article entitled ‘Ambiguous Progress and Its Poetic Correlatives: Percy’s Reliques and Stadial History’ that featured in English Literary History, vol. 81, no. 2. Parts of the Afterword featured in an article in the Keats-Shelley Journal vol. 60. I am grateful to the editorial boards of these journals for allowing me to revise material for inclusion here.

I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Rare Books Room at Cambridge’s University Library, without whom writing this book would have been impossible.

Finally, thanks to Nola Boomer, whose kindness has stayed with me ever since it was conferred.

Introduction

Part One: The Cultural Logic of Progress

As the Seven Years War drew to a close in 1763, the idea of progress in British intellectual life was undergoing a process of rebalancing. In the earlier eighteenth century, the religious implications of the word ‘progress’ commonly outweighed suggestions that human, morality, intellect, society or art could be improved. Broadly providential, the word suggested that the only human elevation possible could be towards God. But in the time span specified by this book’s title, humanist conceptions of progress began to gain greater purchase among British historians and philosophers, albeit that these never supplanted the divine valences of the idea. This book is about this rebalancing: how it shaped, and was shaped by, poetry and poetics in the time.

Several important social and political developments were coeval with the rise of humanist ideas about human development in what J. G. A. Pocock has called the ‘high eighteenth century’.¹ Throughout the decades 1760–90, the enclosure laws sharply truncated common rural rights, and the earliest convulsions of the Industrial Revolution were being felt. Migration from country to city began to ramp up throughout Britain, and modern party politics were taking shape. While Scotland’s political and social conditions after the 1707 union can hardly be said to have been placid or stable, the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 could by 1760 at least be viewed with some historical perspective rather than with visceral distaste. Amidst these changes, ideas of human improvement and decline became cultural cynosures. They influenced and were influenced by several different and disparate domains, as what was commonly referred to as ‘commercial society’ found definition in texts by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson and Henry Home, Lord Kames.² These domains included commerce and science, aesthetics, farming and print culture, nation and faith, art, environment and the offices of state, to name a few. Of the environment, earlier in the century, John Locke, and then Montesquieu borrowed from Vitruvius to propagate ideas of man’s being influenced by his surroundings, and fostered the consequent conviction that these were available to improvement. If the environment was improvable, then so was human development in that environment. Montesquieu’s understanding of progress encompassed the role of climate in shaping human institutions, although a sense of the weather’s being improvable was of course absent. Where trade and commerce had been viewed as largely ameliorative forces in British life in the earlier parts of the century, 1750s Britain saw rapid economic deceleration, rising unemployment and the beginning of the Seven Years War. Whig criticism of Lord Bute’s handling of the negotiations to end the war focused on his leniency towards France, but also on Britain’s too-great shouldering of the debt generated by that conflict. Gin mania took hold in several burgeoning urban centres. Englishman John Brown’s 1757 treatise Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times responded pessimistically to the recent history of trade, expressing the author’s horror at its effects in language wholly typical of the age. Those whose lives had been transformed by commerce were likely to have undergone a sharp loss of ‘martial virtue’ and ‘manly’ vigour.³ Brown’s text encapsulated a commonplace view: a too-great encroachment of commerce into our lives entailed effeminacy or a reversal of gender roles, vanity, luxury and refined indulgence. And so Brown’s Estimate gained significant traction in England, if not Scotland, for describing the decline of Britain at the middle of the century.⁴ But until Brown, such explicit negativity about the state of British man had been attenuated by, among others, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who challenged pessimism by appeals to the idea that a Patriot King would always intervene to attenuate national decline in his The Idea of a Patriot King of 1738. In this he was supported by his friend Jonathan Swift, who believed in the aforementioned divine intervention in human affairs. Bolingbroke, like so many across the anglophone eighteenth century, followed Machiavelli and earlier Renaissance writers and classical writers Livy and Polybius in espousing the idea of historical cycles. These by necessity took larger-scale historical perspectives to observe that any moral, cultural or technological descent would always be followed by an ascent. A cyclical model, rooted in the recurring seasons and practices of agriculture, mitigated the kind of unequivocal pessimism that Brown had expressed, and which was common in British narratives of human progress in this age. Robert Nisbet’s book History of the Idea of Progress (2017) examines Plato and Aristotle’s espousal of the model. Plato’s Laws suggests that humankind develops through a series of stages, predicated first on the family, then a series of intermediate stages before finally reaching what is figured as the culminative city state. As in Aristotle, Plato suggests that, while humankind is destined for this political culmination, there is no guarantee of the sustained health and advancement of this final realization of human advancement. That is, this greatest state of improvement available to humankind is necessarily always susceptible to degradation. This stadial conception of history, like virtually all that are considered in this book, finds its provenance in Hesiod’s division of human development into Gold, Silver, Bronze, demi-God and Iron races. Adapting Hesiod’s stages, in his Statesman, Plato used the consideration of advancement and decline for a sustained meditation on the question of determinism, free will and human progress. While he asserted that man’s golden age was that in which God exerted full care over the development of the human race, God is absent from subsequent stages, and the iniquity and frailty of the human character is manifested in declines in morality and material wealth.

All of the writers discussed in this book considered both the positive and the deleterious effects of commerce. As Adam Smith rationalized the development from mercantilism to the commerce that was reshaping the newly formed country of Britain, luxury (often divided into its benign ‘innocent’ and pernicious ‘vicious’ forms, about which more later), was understood as a state in which man had access to more, and more varied, objects. Numerous narratives describing human progress in the latter half of the century construed this multiplication in available commodities as an index to the state of man, allowing the theorist of progress to infer either improvement or decline from the new commercial diversity. And of course the division of labour, which in large part drove this proliferation and the capacity to pay for it, was another diversification that informed and fed into discussions of human development. The commercial plethora was both a by-product of the commercial stage and the state within which the philosopher constructed stories about the improvement or the decline of man. It was the weather within which one could make wider claims about the climate.

The field within the great eighteenth-century progress discussion which is most germane to this book was the interface between language and progress. The questions most commonly broached by those discussing the issue in the time are laid out in Gottfried Herder’s essay ‘On the Origin of Language’ of 1772. How did language speak to the idea of progress? Did language originate in divine revelation, or did it emerge gradually as part of what we now call evolution? If language is improvable, what are the consequences of this for human progress? What are the true relationships between language, cognition and societal development?⁵ European philosophers, historians and antiquarians including Giambattista Vico and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot propagated the belief that language could be ameliorative in human development because it allowed the preservation and dissemination of knowledge. And repeatedly in the later writing of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Auguste Comte we encounter the belief that thought advances, and that wider human progress is attendant on this first development.

Others reversed the dynamic that suggested that language effected positive development. David Hume, for one, held that the rule of law in republican states must be established before any advancement of knowledge and before either the ‘fine’ or the ‘practical’ arts is possible. This is extensive with his thought that, only in a state of comfort and safety, in which members of a community are at leisure to think and create, can the arts improve. Primitive man’s moral and linguistic progress had been stunted because he had been for too long fearful for his life and pressed into the extremes imposed by depredation. Hume observes how that situation evolves in history, and how with increased security and affluence, the arts were the outcrop of a more complex late stage of humanity, unfettered by the imperative merely to survive. This discussion conditioned one of the pervasive cultural touchstones of the age, the ‘ancients’ versus ‘moderns’ comparison: a discussion about whether language and the written arts had improved or degraded since the time of (for example) Virgil. To rehearse the argument would be unnecessary. Suffice it to say that those favouring the ‘moderns’ took the view that recent writing was superior for its eschewal of the exaggeration and hyperbole of earlier language. Post-Restoration writing was characterized instead by the calmness, precision and simplicity afforded by a life of relative luxury, free from extreme poverty. Society had advanced, as had thought, as had language.

By contrast, many bewailed what been lost from language in the late progress of humankind. As will be explored in Chapter 5, philosophe Ètienne Bonnot de Condillac maintained a conviction that the obscuration of the gestural, pre-analytic and pre-philosophical origins of language was one reason for the enervation of modern language and thought. It was his conviction that language and the arts had become anaemic for their becoming antiquated from its physical and gestural roots. Hugh Blair was the highest-profile and most passionate adopter of this idea in Britain, and as we shall see, his lectures are given such force because he believes that the gestural origins of language are still discoverable in prosody. For Blair the physical roots of numbered language could recuperate the perspicuity of a language free of gratuitous ornament, and this could effect moral progress. In this, Blair, after Condillac, predicated his theories of the progress of language on its verbal characteristics. But it would be misleading to assert that to do so was commonplace in discussions yoking human progress to the development of language. In the vast majority of considerations of language’s improvement, and of its capacity to improve human life, it was portrayed instrumentally. In the many treatments of language in history and progress narratives, language’s appeals to the senses and its status as an aesthetic mode are often drastically truncated. And just as the prevailing practice was to assert the instrumental or pragmatic nature of language, the majority of those who construed the state of poetry in a given time as a sign of its progress, spent little or no time on what might be called the aesthetics of verse. Overwhelmingly, the particular, special verbal characteristics of poetic language are emptied out, and the status of verse in a given time is a mere sign to be read by the writer of the historical treatise. This book is an attempt to recover those who reinstated the aesthetic, and to parse the relationship between that reinstatement and ideas of progress.

While poetry certainly featured in discussions of language and progress, it would be false to assert that treatises of language were routinely also enquiries into the state of poetry. It is better to think of the language-and-progress discussions as the foundations upon which a more subtle, less copious and, I would argue, more interesting discussion of poetry are carried out. The discussions of poetry and progress considered here are qualitatively different to general discussions of language and progress because they mark points in which the mode of expression under consideration is no longer a passive historical artefact or an instrument for effecting improvement through the transmission of knowledge. In texts by Thomas Sheridan, Joshua Steele and James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, no matter how temporally distant the verse is, it is something with which they must participate physically as well as emotionally and intellectually. It is common now to assume that the late eighteenth-century writer performs the (often assumed to be proto-Romantic) conjuring act of revivification, breathing life into expired historical objects in the attempt to make them alive to the reader and thus elicit empathy or sympathy. The overarching argument in this book is that the actual physical act of breathing, of making sounds in reading and speaking verse, produces a particular historical sense that would remain unrealized had that breathing not happened. One distinctive function of poetry is that it takes a mode of expression that is most often used functionally (language) and asks its user to inhabit it sensually: to taste, feel and hear that which has hitherto remained at the status of a sign or an instrument. The authors discussed here alighted at these discrete characteristics, and in doing so developed ways of understanding progress that are quite separate to general discussions of languageand progress.

If an historical recovery of the aesthetics of verse is the main objective of this book, another is to show that Scottish views of progress are distinctive enough to warrant special articulation, and that these views read poetry in the ways described above. As with much Scottish thinking in the time, Scottish ideas of progress emerged out of dialogue with the philosophy of mainland Europe. Montesquieu’s 1748 treatise De l’esprit des lois set the tone and prescribed the method for Scottish philosophical and historical treatments of the idea between 1760 and 1790.⁶ Montesquieu described general, universal features of state formation, and his observations would go on to have a wide impact on British philosophical history. But his overarching objective in De l’esprit was to give an indictment of the current state of laws and manners, and to put these, as would become commonplace in the age, in comparison with those of preceding stages of human development. What was, and still is, most striking, about the text is that it draws on testimonies from illiterate, often itinerant, people from across a disparate range of geographical locations in Montesquieu’s own time. Understanding his rationale for doing so sheds light on the foundations of an emergent form of Scottish historiography which would in time become known as conjectural history. That rationale is as follows: observing contemporary (that is, eighteenth-century) ‘savages’ or ‘primitives’ allowed a view of man as he had been at earlier stages of development. A non-literate community in one’s own time, for example, allows a window onto how preliterate man developed earlier social institutions and cultural practices.

This form of historical comparison is uniformitarian; it is predicated on the idea that the essential characteristics and stages of human development are the same even if they are moved through at different speeds: culture and society are not susceptible to qualitative historical change. Further, it presupposes that a ‘barbarous’ community in the Scottish highlands, for example, serves as a fairly unproblematic guide to the ‘unpolished’ peoples of not only a distant past but also potentially a distant land. Scottish historian William Robertson is one of several to distil this position: ‘in every part of earth, the progress of man hath been nearly the same; and we can trace him in his career from the rude simplicity of savage life, until he attains the industry, the arts, and the elegance, of polished society’.⁷ Robertson, like so many other writers of progress narratives in the age, emphasizes the uniformity of what humankind had gone through – clear, universal stages of development – rather than its special regional character, or the fact that the pace of change might be so uneven as to debunk a uniformitarian model. In any case, this ‘species of philosophical investigation’, later to be designated ‘conjectural history’ by Scottish professor of moral philosophy Dugald Stewart, focused as Montesquieu’s did, on the state of historically distant changes in human communities as a means of rationalizing eighteenth-century practices and institutions. Stewart articulates this in a passage from his Dissertation: ‘That the capacities of the human mind have been in all ages the same, and that the diversity of human phenomena exhibited by our species is the result merely of the different circumstances in which men are placed, has been long received as an incontrovertible logical maxim.’⁸ These words capture the great underpinning of historiography in the age: conjecture about the development of humankind between its discrete epochs was possible because the essential nature of human character was regarded as immutable.

Two ideas are often conflated in the nebulous phrase ‘conjectural history’. One is the kind of conjecture undertaken to shed light on the causes of events in human development before humankind started recording its interactions, trade transactions, wars, migrations and so on. In other words, conjecture is what the eighteenth-century historical writer did when faced with a paucity of material, written, reliable or otherwise in prehistory. The second strand broached the problem of how to account for the progress of humankind from one discrete stage of development to the next. In his lectures on jurisprudence in Glasgow between 1762 and 1763, Adam Smith described stage divisions that would become so common in Scottish historiography as to accrue to the status of common sense:

The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce. If a number of persons were shipwrecked on a desart island their first sustenance would be from the fruits which the soil naturaly produced, and the wild beasts which they could kill. As these could not at all times be sufficient, they come at last to tame some of the wild-beasts […] In process of time even these would not be sufficient, and as they saw the earth naturally produce considerable quantities of vegetables of it’s own accord they would think of cultivating it so that it might produce more of them. Hence agriculture. […] The age of commerce naturaly [sic] succeeds that of agriculture. As men could now confine themselves to one species of labour, they would naturaly [sic] exchange the surplus of their own commodity for that of another of which they stood in need.⁹

Again, the vision is uniformitarian, if not essentialist. Stadial history is erected on the assumption that the stages are the same everywhere, and that a community centred around animal husbandry is merely at an earlier stage of development than one practicing commerce rather than developing in a different way. Poetry takes its place among animal husbandry, commerce and farming as a sign of progress. Blair takes up the idea of the universality of human characteristics to posit the idea that poems circumvent the more trivial registration of fact and offer ‘the history of human imagination and passion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow-creatures in the most artless ages.’¹⁰ He suggests that this recovery should produce a sense of deterritorialized commonality rather than a more coherent sense of national partisanship: ‘It is probable, too, that an extensive search would discover a certain degree of resemblance among all the most ancient poetical productions, from whatever country they proceeded. In a similar state of manners, similar objects and passions operating upon the imaginations of men, will stamp their productions with the same general character.’¹¹ Poetry is the aperture through which the universality of human manners can be viewed.

The conjectural method had gained purchase in Scotland decades before Stewart gave it that moniker in the early nineteenth century. Monboddo, whose Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92; hereafter the Origin) is discussed in Chapter 3, was a passionate proponent of the conjectural method, and many of the works that he cited when writing the Origin from the Advocates’ Library of Edinburgh, were travel books containing accounts of the manners, customs, institutions and languages of ‘savage’ eighteenth-century peoples. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Monboddo at least attempted to go beyond merely reading about the ‘primitives’ of his day. Between 1763 and 1765 he went on professional trips to Paris and took particular interest in the contents of the Cabinet du Roi, the celebrated collection of natural artefacts established by French King Louis XII in 1633. Here, Monboddo examined the objects of primitivism not only of antiquity but of his own time, and he surmised that nothing, qualitatively, distinguished the old from the new. As is well known, he interviewed a savage ‘savage girl’ and documented her words and verbal tics as though they allowed untrammelled access to the ‘savages’ of prehistory.¹² Of course, Monboddo’s designation ‘savage girl’ calls to mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealized savage, unable morally to err because he exists in a state of nature in which good and evil are inoperative. There is a rhetorical logic to Monboddo’s conjecturalism. One may use the evidence of one’s own time to construct a progress narrative with a particular suggestiveness, whether it be that progress is a kind of decline, that it develops cyclically or that it necessarily entails improvement.

Those who espoused conjectural history understood human development in a series of delimited stages. As a result, as David Spadafora elaborated in his influential and wide-ranging 1990 work The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Scottish late Enlightenment suggestions about improvement or decline are more ambivalent than those abroad elsewhere at the time: there are end points to every stage. This is in stark contrast to models of perfectibility or unbounded improvement that had greater currency not only as is often assumed in France between Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and Nicolas de Condorcet, but also in England among Edward Gibbon, Thomas Astle, the anonymous translator of Rousseau’s Emile and Bishop Jonathan Shipley. Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem The Fable of the Bees was a stark rejoinder to what its author saw as excessively optimistic notions of human nature. In this allegory in iambic tetrametrical couplets, Mandeville posits that the kind of faith that Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury had in human nature was selective and Romantic. Civilization was by no means an unmitigated good, in part because it was supported by human vice rather than virtue. Employment, trade, the arts and sciences and virtually all of society are lubricated with the money which flows from viceful human nature and behaviour. In this vision, then, it appears wholly mistaken to argue that civilization is a manifestation of human moral probity. Mandeville’s disagreed with Shaftesbury on Rousseau’s thinking, whose first Discourse is a deeply ambivalent work about the goodness of human nature on the one hand and the many depravities of civilization on the other. This bifurcated way of thinking had a wide-reaching influence: many of the Scots in particular writing treatises on human progress did so from a deeply compromised position of optimism. Their belief in delimitations as necessary parts of historical understanding in no way tempered the stridency of their belief in truly ambivalent progress. This to write that the Scottish view of human development encompassed the powerfully good as well as the powerfully bad. Underpinning this ambivalence is the belief that primitive people had very few objects of attention, and that these were associated with subsistence. This is contrasted with a commercial stage in which the economy grows, labour is divided, and luxury and its objects come as a by-product. Just as labour becomes specialized and the value of each specialization is rationalized, thinkers such as Ferguson, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Kames were all, in their own ways, impressed and troubled by this plethora.

Ferguson recognized that specialization had worked in ways that could not have been expected or contrived by the mere exertion of the human mind: ‘Men, in fact, while they pursue in society different objects or separate views, procure a wide distribution of power, and by a species of chance, arrive at a posture for civil engagements, more favourable to human nature than what human wisdom could ever calmly devise.’¹³ The anxiety of variety and proliferation is one of the master narratives of Scottish thinking in the time, with a dichotomy emerging between ‘innocent’ and ‘vicious’ luxury. As with his view of language, Hume saw the former as a spur to ingenuity and the healthy development of the state, because it entailed a freeing-up of humanity from the obligation to work, whereas the latter meant gluttony, greed and sensual gratification. Innocent