uel Rogers.-7. Thomas Campbell.-8. Walter Savage Landor. 9. Thomas Moore.-10. Lord Byron.-11. Percy Bysshe Shelley.-12. John Keats.-13. Robert Bloomfield; William L. Bowles; Mary Tighe; James Montgomery; Robert Montgomery; Henry Kirke White; Reginald Heber; Felicia Hemans; James Hogg; T. L. Beddoes; John Keble; Ebenezer Elliott; Hartley Coleridge; Arthur Henry Hallam; Letitia Elizabeth Landon. 611 1. Sir Walter Scott.-2. Prominence of the Novel as a Form of Literature. 3. William Godwin; Maria Edgeworth; Mat- thew Gregory Lewis; Amelia Opie; Jane Austen; Jane Porter; Anna Maria Porter; Barbara Hofland; Mary Brunton. — 4. Mrs. Shelley; James Morier; Thomas Hope; Robert P. Ward; Theodore Hook; Thomas H. Lister; Lady Blessington; Mrs. Trollope; Mary Russell Mitford; G. P. R. James; John Galt; William H. Ainsworth.-5. Dramatists: Joanna Baillie; Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd; James Sheridan Knowles.-6. Six Greatest Novelists between 1830 and 1850: Captain Marryat; 1. William Gifford.-2. William Cobbett.-3. Leigh Hunt. — 4. Charles Lamb.-5. William Hazlitt.-6. Sydney Smith. — 7. John Wilson.-8. Thomas De Quincey.-9. James and Horace Smith.-10. Lord Jeffrey; Lord Brougham; Lord Ma- caulay.-11. John Foster.-12. Thomas Hood.-13. Douglas Jerrold. 14. Thomas Carlyle. - 15. Historians: Henry Hart Milman; James Mill; William Mitford; Connop Thirlwall; John Lingard; Patrick Fraser Tytler; Henry Hallam; George Grote; Thomas Arnold; Earl Stanhope; Sir William Napier; FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: SCHOLARS, PHILOSO PHERS, THEOLOGIANS, AND MEN OF SCIENCE. 1. Scholars: Richard Porson; Isaac Disraeli; Thomas F. Dibdin; George L. Craik; John Payne Collier.-2. Philosophers: Dugald Stewart; Thomas Brown; Sir James Mackintosh; Sir William Hamilton; Richard Whately. -3. Theologians: Rob- ert Hall; Thomas Chalmers; Augustus William Hare; Julius Charles Hare; Edward B. Pusey; John Keble; John Henry Newman; Thomas Arnold; Frederick D. Maurice; Frederick W. Robertson. -4. Men of Political Science: Jeremy Bentham; T. R. Malthus; David Ricardo; Nassau W. Senior. - 5. Men of Physical Science: Sir William Herschel; Sir Humphry Davy; ENGLISH LITERATURE. INTRODUCTION. 1. THE literature of a people tells its life. History records its deeds; but literature brings to us, yet warm with their first heat, the appetites and passions, the keen intellectual debate, the higher promptings of the soul, whose blended energies produced the substance of the record. We see some part of a man's outward life, and guess his character, but do not know it as we should if we heard also the debate within, loud under outward silence, and could be spectators of each conflict for which lists are set within the soul. Such witnesses we are, through English literature, of the life of the English-speaking race. Let us not begin the study with a dull belief that it is but a bewilderment of names, dates, and short summaries of conventional opinion, which must be learned by rote. As soon as we can feel that we belong to a free people with a noble past, let us begin to learn through what endeavors and to what end it is free. Liberty as an abstraction is not worth a song. It is precious only for that which it enables us to be and do. Let us bring our hearts, then, to the study which we here begin, and seek through it accord with that true soul of our country by which we may be encouraged to maintain in our own day the best work of our forefathers. The literature of England has for its most distinctive mark the religious sense of duty. It represents a people striving through successive generations to find out the right, and do it, to root out the wrong, and labor ever onward for the love of God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to show that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone the English race can expect to keep, the foremost place among the nations. 2. One of the first facts for the student of English literature to make note of is the identity and the continuity of that literature, under all changes in its outward form, from a time near the middle of the seventh century down to the present. Some have taught that English literature begins in the fourteenth century, with Chaucer and his associates; and that the literature that was in England before that time, being called by such names as Anglo-Saxon and Semi-Saxon, was quite another matter, was a literature so different from the English as to be almost an alien literature. This is a twofold mistake, historical and literary. For at least seven hundred years before Chaucer the people of England called themselves the English people, just as they have done during the five hundred years since Chaucer; and during all those centuries they have uniformly called their language and their literature English like For twelve hundred years the people and the speech of England have preserved themselves; they have gone steadily forward in their normal development; neither has lost its identity. Moreover, English literature before Chaucer, not only had this long existence of seven hundred years, but it was abundant in many forms of prose and poetry. When Chaucer came, instead of supposing himself to be at the beginning of a literature, he thought himself at the end of one; and in his poems he asks forbearance of his readers, on the plea that all the harvest of poetry had then been reaped by his predecessors, and that he could only go through the field, and glean among their leavings. 3. We need, also, early in our studies, to fix upon some clear and useful system for the division of English literature into periods. Of course, all such divisions are arbitrary; some of them are likewise fanciful and confusing: yet, if we can discover one that is without the faults last mentioned, we shall find these advantages in it: (1) It will break up a very large subject into manageable portions. |