English Language and Literary Criticism Author:James Baldwin 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: who have, during their whole existence, really thought and written. Among the ancients, the Latin literature is Worth nothing at the outset; then it borrowed, an... more »d became imitative. Among the moderns, German literature does not exist for nearly two centuries. Italian literature and Spanish literature end at the middle of the seventeenth century. Only ancient Greece, modern France, and England offer a complete series of significant monuments." The student of English literature has entered upon a broad field,—one so vast, indeed, that a life-time of study will enable him to master only parts of the stupendous whole which lies before him. He should approach the work with an earnest, inquiring spirit and an enthusiastic desire for knowledge and mental improvement. He should not rest content with merely superficial attainments, but should strive for that thoroughness without which there is neither true excellence nor enjoyment. He must not expect to find the whole of English literature in a single book or in any number of books. It is not a mere array of names and dates, of short biographical sketches, and select quotations from standard authors. Neither does it consist of a series of ingenious and sentimental speculations relative to the love-affairs, the religious opinions, the politics, of great writers. It deals primarily with books; and the study of these books necessarily involves the investigation of every important circumstance connected with their production. To acquire any serviceable knowledge of a book, the student must become familiar wfth the conditions under which it was first conceived. He must become acquainted with the history of the country and of the .period which produced it. Moreover, he should seek to trace the influence which that book has exerted, or is li...« less