PREFATORY NOTE. The present work, the outcome of several years' practical experience in teaching English literature, is intended as a text-book for the middle forms of schools, and is designed to form a stepping-stone between the bare summary and the more elaborate and extensive critical works. It aims at presenting a descriptive rather than a critical account of English writers from Chaucer to Tennyson, an account in which due proportion is observed between the greater and the lesser writers. It makes no pretension to be exhaustive, and was undertaken solely in the belief that a simple and straightforward account of English literature on the lines here adopted would fill a place yet unoccupied in the schools. The plan of the book is to deal separately with the lives and works of the greater writers, and to group in classes those of lesser note and importance. An attempt has been made throughout to indicate the relations of the writers to their forerunners, to their own times, and to their successors. The period traversed is divided into four parts, as follows: (1) from Chaucer to Marlowe; (2) from Shakespeare to Dryden; (3) from Pope to Cowper; (4) from Wordsworth to Tennyson. Each of these is provided with a chronological table and an index, and, while complete in itself, fits into the scheme of the whole. Short illustrative passages from the works of most of the writers are incorporated with the text, but as it was impossible, within the space at command, adequately to represent the work of the greater writers, two companion volumes of selections are being prepared: (1) Specimens of English poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson. (2) Specimens of English prose from Chaucer to Carlyle. It is hoped that these will fulfil a useful office among school text-books. I desire to express my cordial thanks to those who have afforded me assistance during the preparation of this volume. To the judgment and taste of Mr. Stephen Gwynn, who, with the utmost care and trouble, has gone over the book both in manuscript and in proof, it is greatly indebted; Mr. W. J. Craig, M.A., Trinity College, Dublin, editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, put his knowledge of our literature at my disposal; and Professor William Graham, Queen's College, Belfast, was my adviser in the treatment of the philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke. It gives me pleasure to record here my sincere appreciation of the kindness as well as of the value of their counsels. ELIZABETH LEE. October, 1897. II. THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS: BEN JONSON AND I. Ben Jonson, II. Beaumont and Fletcher, III. Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Middleton, III. THE LESSER ELIZABETHAN WRITERS 1. The Lyrical Poets and the Song-writers, Poets, - 68 III. Imitators of Spenser: Giles and Phineas Fletcher, VI. Waller and Denham: Poets of Transition, 71 73 80 81 83 84 87 88 174 JOHN BUNYAN AND JEREMY TAYLOR, IX. SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE 1. The Philosophers, II. The Historians, - 184 191 ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRYDEN. CHAPTER I. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The figure of William Shakespeare Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb Shakespeare, English poet. The crowns o' the world: O eyes sublime the greatest towers giant-like over all English poets. his bio With Shakespeare, as with most of his contemporaries, materials for a biography are scanty. In Elizabethan times a greater interest seems to have been Difficulties of taken in poems and plays than in their constructing authors, who, as poets or men of letters graphy. merely, were of slight importance in the public eye. It did not occur to their contemporaries to make notes of their sayings and doings with a view to future biographies. Certain poets-Spenser and Milton for example-disclose freely in their poems their characters, opinions, ideals, and tastes: they speak to us almost undisguisedly in their own persons; but Shakespeare was a dramatist, and in his plays always speaks through the personages he has created, so that it would be unwise to assume that what they say is really an expression of the poet's personal feeling or opinion. Yet from a general study of any poet's work it is always possible to conjecture, not indeed the |