Search -
The Last Hundred Years of English Literature
The Last Hundred Years of English Literature Author:Charles Grant General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1866 Original Publisher: F. Fromann Description: Based on a course of lectures delivered in Jena in the winter of 1864-65.--Pref. Subjects: English literature Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a bla... more »ck and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER I. We must now enter into an examination of our literature during the second period which falls under our consideration. This age may be said to begin with the century, and to end with the death of Scott, in 1832. It differs in many important respects from that which proceeded it. The latter was, as we have seen, an age of struggle. The cold regularity of the classical school had been attacked and conquered by a few men of genius. This struggle had not, as in Germany, been fonght by the critics, but by the poets. They had destroyed the old taste by creating a new one; and it was not till this taste had been embodied in works of art that the critics declared in its favour. In Germany a single man, Lessing, attacked and destroyed an absurd code of literary laws, and set poetry free from the chains that had bound her. In England the same work was done by Chatterlon, Percy, and Cowper. But the way in which it was done was very different. Lessing measured the authors of the classical school by the literature that they themselves had chosen, and found them wanting. Percy appealed to another standard, and repub- lished our ancient poems. He turned from Greece to the England of the Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan age. Hence the different directions which the two literatures took as soon as they were freed from their trammels. That of Germany passed through ...« less