A History of English Literature

Literary criticism Johnson’s moral essays and Rasselas have long been admired, and his prayers and meditations can move atheists ...

James Boswell (1740–1795), the son of a lowland Law Lord, made a Grand Tour. When in Switzerland he charmed both Voltaire and Ro ...

character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated ...

finished work is as overwhelming as the Palace of Versailles when occupied, although his manner is sometimes of the kind which l ...

Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) was, like Dryden, Addison, Gay and Johnson, an Augustan all-rounder, writing an an ...

Frances Burney Frances Burney Frances Burney (1752–1840), also known as ‘Fanny’, wrote from the age of ten, and had transcribed ...

spoke. He spoke for six hours in the trial of Warren Hastings. Oratory led to office, and he then divided his public career, as ...

anthologies often include the curious and delightful ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey’, a section of the unpublished Jubilat ...

Cowper discovered that walking was beneficial. He conducts our eye through the scene: Here Ouse, slow winding through a level pl ...

Edinburgh’s taverns. The farm failing, Burns took a post in the Excise, collecting taxes for the Crown. Expanded Poems were publ ...

a single man’. At times, however, Burns teams up his ‘Scottish Dialect’ with non- dialect words, as in the fourth word in the fi ...

Overview English Romantic literature is overwhelmingly a poetic one, with six major poets writing in the first quarter of the 19 ...

shared Milton’s hope that paradise might be restored by politics, he came to regard the political radicals, his allies, as blind ...

(without mention of Coleridge). The quality and impact of the best poems were such that lyric poetry and imaginative literature ...

The idea of the American Revolution excited European intellectuals. French Romantics were radical and liberal, but English Roman ...

rightly praised his ability to face the worst with terrible calm – as in ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, which attains moral gra ...

Coleridge’s earlier Frost at Midnight was a model for Tintern, giving landscaped reflection a new poetic intensity and psychic d ...

either of its elaborated versions, it is the most worthwhile long poem of the 19th century (Byron’s Don Juan being the most ente ...

The noise of wood and water, and the mist That on the line of each of those two roads Advanced in such indísputable shapes; All ...

Biographia Literaria, whereas the poet imitates the divine creativity by the power of primary Imagination. This is the centre of ...