LOUNSBURY. History of the English Language. Henry Holt and Company. Dictionary of National Biography. The Macmillan Company. Cambridge History of English Literature (earlier volumes). G. P. Putnam's Sons. GARNETT and Gosse. History of English Literature, Vols. I-III. The Macmillan Company. SAINTSBURY. Short History of English Literature. The Macmillan Company. School histories of English literature by Long (Ginn and Company), Halleck (American Book Company), Moody and Lovett (Charles Scribner's Sons), Newcomer (Scott, Foresman and Company), and other authors. BROOKE. History of Early English Literature. The Macmillan Company. LEWIS. Beginnings of English Literature. Ginn and Company. BENHAM. English Literature from Widsith to the Death of Chaucer. Yale University Press. BALDWIN. Introduction to English Medieval Literature. Longmans, Green & Co. BATES. The English Religious Drama. The Macmillan Company. SCHOFIELD. English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer. The Macmillan Company. SCHOFIELD. English Literature from Chaucer to Elizabeth. The Macmillan KITTREDGE. Chaucer and his Poetry. Harvard University Press. SYMONS. Studies in the Elizabethan Drama. E. P. Dutton & Company. PHELPS. Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. Ginn and Company. Collections: COOK and TINKER. Select Translations from Old English Poetry. Ginn and Company. COOK. A Literary Middle English Reader. Ginn and Company. KITTREDGE and SARGENT. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Houghton Mifflin Company. THAYER. The Best Elizabethan Plays. Ginn and Company. GARNETT. English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria. Ginn and Company. HOPKINS and HUGHES. The English Novel before the Nineteenth Century. Ginn and Company. TUPPER. Representative English Drama from Dryden to Sheridan. Oxford University Press. MANLY. English Prose and Poetry (Ginn and Company). Also similar volumes by other publishers. Series, Libraries, etc.: English Men of Letters. The Macmillan Company. Athenæum Press Series (for old English ballads, Elizabethan and seventeenth-century lyrics, Shakespeare's sonnets, and selections from Addison, Burns, Fielding, Gray, Collins, Herrick, the Morte d'Arthur, the pre-Shakespearean drama, Sheridan, Sidney, and Steele). Ginn and Company. Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists. Charles Scribner's Sons. Everyman's Library. E. P. Dutton & Company. Bohn Library. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Temple Library. E. P. Dutton & Company. School series: Standard English Classics (Ginn and Company). Also similar series by other publishers. Shakespeare: Editions: Cambridge (1 vol.). Houghton Mifflin Company. Oxford (3 vols.). Oxford University Press. Temple (40 vols.). J. M. Dent & Sons. School texts: New Hudson (16 plays) (Ginn and Company). Also school series by other publishers. Biography, criticism, etc.: ABBOTT. A Shakespearean Grammar. The Macmillan Company. BRANDES. William Shakespeare, a Critical Study. The Macmillan Com- BAKER. Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist. The Macmillan MOULTON. Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. Oxford University Press. Suggested Topics Beowulf and Roland as epic heroes. The Canterbury pilgrims. "Piers Plowman" as a social document. Theories of ballad composition. An Elizabethan song recital. Spenser and Ariosto. Bacon's view of life as revealed in the "Essays." The English religious drama. The story of Shakespeare's life. The stage in Shakespeare's time. London in Shakespeare's time. Milton's prose. "Paradise Lost" and "The Divine Comedy." Scenes from "The Pilgrim's Progress." The Spectator-its material and value. Pope's "Essay on Criticism." One of the eighteenth-century novelists. Goldsmith as a man. One of the early Romantic poets. A Burns song recital. Carlyle's estimate of Burns. CHAPTER XIII ENGLISH LITERATURE (CONTINUED) With the opening years of the nineteenth century came the full tide of the Romantic movement in English letters. It was essentially an age of poetry, glorified by the names of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others. But the prose literature of the period includes names scarcely less illustrious-Sir Walter Scott, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey. In point of time it covers less than forty years, reaching roughly from the publication of "Lyrical Ballads" by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. English Romanticism is of perennial interest because of its display of the enthusiasm and individualism of youth, its revolt against rigid rules of art, its imaginative fervor and sense of beauty, its use of the finest impulses of mind and heart. THE POETRY OF ROMANTICISM Several poets of the Romantic period call for a brief study. George Gordon, Lord Byron1 (1788-1824) was born in London, was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, published his earliest poems before he was twenty, proved a dazzling figure in the public eye, lived abroad in self-exile after a period of domestic unhappiness, and died at the age of thirty-six at Missolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to aid the cause of Greek independence. "That mighty genius," Scott described him, "which walked amongst us as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or evil." 1It will be noticed that the Romantic poets are not here treated strictly in their chronological order. The reader will bear in mind that 1798, the year of the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads," ushers in the age of Romanticism in English poetry. The contemporary fame of Byron, especially on the Continent, where indeed he still has a much greater popularity than in England, was due to his brilliant personality and glorious sense of power and to the expression which he gave to the spirit of his agerevolt, freedom, self-reliance. His faults are obvious: personal coarseness and egotism, bombast, flippancy, arrogance. Yet he was a warm-hearted friend, he exhibited physical and moral courage, he loved freedom, and he hated hypocrisy. The following lines from "Manfred," the play which seems best to present the typical Byronic hero, give the measure of Byron himself: "This should have been a noble creature: he A goodly frame of glorious elements, It is an awful chaos—light and darkness— And mind and dust-and passions and pure thoughts, All dormant and destructive." While we find in Byron's poetry little magic, or subtle beauty, or real artistry, such as characterized the work of his fellow English poets, certain remarkable qualities, and these of no mean order, reveal themselves. Byron describes poetry as "the lava of the imagination, whose irruption prevents an earthquake." He displays, when at his best, energy, eloquence, volcanic power. His nature poetry, especially his descriptions of the sea, is deservedly famous; and as a satirist he has few rivals among English poets. Such of Byron's lyrics as "Maid of Athens," "Stanzas to Augusta," and "She Walks in Beauty" and other poems included in "Hebrew Melodies," will always be popular; so also will his diary in verse, "Childe Harold," especially Cantos III and IV; his brilliant metrical romances "Mazeppa" and "The Prisoner of Chillon"; and the finest passages of his masterpiece, "Don Juan." The best of Byron's prose is almost as noteworthy as his best verse; and the man himself remains more interesting than either his prose or his poetry. |