A short history of English literature - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ...ceased) to care for passionate and romantic narrative. Its love-poetry, though still retaining an exquisite sweetness, was sinking towards gallantry and badinage. Its leaning in didactic verse was shifting from the metaphysical and theological to the scientific and merely ethical. It was acquiring a strong craving for satire--political and other. Above all, it was becoming gradually less dreamy and more business-like, while its critical tendencies in the lower sense were also being 1 Sandys (1577-1643), a traveller and a. translator, who wrote good prose as well as verse, published, rather late, translations of Oz/id (I632), paraphrases of the Scriptures (1636 and later), a tragedy, Christ': Passion, etc. (ed. Hooper, 2 vols. London, 1872). Saudys uses various metres, but has a distinct and early command of the couplet. For Sir john Beaumont,-u. sup. p. 35 5. awakened. For all these purposes the stanza, the sonnet, and the other forms dearest to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans proper were extremely ill suited. They all demanded oratorical point, clean hitting, and mathematical arrangement, for which the couplet was as well suited as the others were unapt. And though, even after nearly a century, it is difficult to get our ears to accept the fact, there is no doubt that to those surfeited with other sounds the sharp rattle, the regular tick, as it may be called, of this couplet was a grateful and agreeable change. We still have to make a positive effort to understand what four or five generations meant by saying that VValler had invented and Dryden perfected " harmony " and " smoothness of numbers." Mere study will indeed show us that the couplet had already acquired over these generations such a mastery that when they talked thu...