Out of Stock
Overview
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: (liDJb A Familiab phenomenon in the eyes of all students of literary history is the play of action and reaction, ebb and flow, in the course of the literature of every country. There is a certain sense in which progress maybe recognized there, just as in the social condition of a nation; but it by no means follows from this, that what is written in each age is an advance on what has been written by the ago before. On the contrary, intervals occur, during which little is doing of any excellence; and when these pass over, the revival often takes the form of a restoration. The now men of genins revolt against their immediate predecessors, and recur to the study of predecessors long gone by. This is peculiarly true of the English, and is in harmony with their action in the cognate world of political life. The patriots who first moved against Charles the First, dul not want to make a now England or a new English monarchy, but to restore what thcv believed the old to have been, and to save the kingdom from becoming what, by an undue trinmph over the best elements of the feudal system, the Continental kingdoms had become. Among literary movements of a similar character, that in which we are interested on the present occasion is the awakened love for things meditcval and feudal which is now nearly a hundred years old. It is astonishing how little the most characteristic men of the eighteenth century cared for anything that was older than the revival of learning, or, indeed, for much of the highest value that was considerably later. Johnson edited Shakspeare without hardly troubling himself to look at any other Elizabethan dramatist. Dante was spoken of as a whimsical writer. Chaucer was neglected as?to use the words which Cowley had applied to him? a dry old-fashioned wit. ...
| ISBN-13 | 9781458978202 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1458978206 |
| Weight | 2.03 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.41 In |
| List Price | $22.40 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 636 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
