William Sotheby was the consummate gentleman of letters in the Romantic era, a role that both tied him to the past as well as pointed to the future. While George Gordon, Lord Byron, found him a patronizing bore and satirized him in Beppo (1818) as Mr. Botherby, an "antique gentleman of rhyme," most literary men and women, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Sir Walter Scott, found him a loyal friend and a generous patron. Sotheby was a prodigious poet, playwright, and translator, though aside from his translation of Christoph Martin Wieland's verse fantasy Oberon few of his works transcended the conventions of the day or exercised an enduring influence. Despite its conventionality, his artistic output does serve to provide a literary and aesthetic context that sets the work of William Wordsworth and others into full relief, showing both their relationship with their aesthetic environment and their originality. Sotheby's most...