A History of English Literature

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Overview After the brilliant achievements of Pope, literary civilization broadened to include more of the middle class and of wo ...

Periodicals carried literary essays on civilized neutral topics, including literature itself. The status of literature is shown ...

believed in the universal authority of Reason, and in its ability to understand and explain, as in Pope’s line: ‘God said,Let Ne ...

by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), for whom Christianity was a necessary curb to human unreason. The realist Bernard de Mandeville ( ...

Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Ci ...

Jonathan Swift The smooth rise of Addison was interrupted only when the Whigs were out, which took him briefly into journalism ( ...

upon men’s belief and actions .... Every candid reader will easily understand my discourse to be intended only in defence of nom ...

The King was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was am ...

My female friends, whose tender hearts Have better learned to play their parts, Receive the news in doleful dumps, ‘The Dean is ...

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie. The ease ...

Romantic poetry of nature. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth attacked the artificial diction of Pope, claim ...

‘Cou’d all our care elude the greedy Grave, Which claims no less the Fearful than the Brave, For Lust of Fame I shou’d not vainl ...

caused by Lord Petre’s snipping a love-lock from the head of Arabella Fermor, the Belinda of the poem. These were Catholic famil ...

A third interprets motions, looks and eyes; At every word a reputation dies. But social life has compensations: ‘Belinda smiled, ...

So very reasonable, so unmoved, As never yet to love, or to be loved. She, while her lover pants upon her breast Can mark the fi ...

pedant Bentley to a young milord on the Grand Tour: ‘Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too.’ The Queen of Dullness (i.e. Queen C ...

London since 1705: ‘an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated and always has prevailed’ (Johnson). ...

nThe novel Daniel Defoe A London butcher called Foe had a son who called himself Defoe.Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was expert in ac ...

‘had not time to lose’ as he told his story full of things: a saw, planks, a knife, ropes, a raft, a cabin, how to grow crops. W ...