A History of English Literature

action, how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals ...!’ ‘And yet’, Haml ...

The Reformation The Protestant Reformation had begun in 1517 with Martin Luther’s attacks on the Church’s penitential system, or ...

shared a new faith in education: a classical education which taught bright lads, and the princes and princesses they would serve ...

an angelic dispenser of nonsense. ‘More’ means moron; the king is called Ademos (Gk: ‘without a people’). More tells Hythloday t ...

roses, and all stars voided, saving only the sweet governess of the heaven, Venus, which keepeth the bounds of the night and the ...

Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, Si ...

Nor am I not where Christ is given in prey For money, poison, and treason – at Rome A common practice, usèd night and day. But h ...

If force might serve to succour Troyë town, This right hand well mought have been her defence. might But Troyë now commendeth to ...

translating for speedy silent readers in a world where there is too much to read! Their gift of tongues is sometimes no more tha ...

This prose for God was not built in a day, but was the work of generations. The emergence of a weekday prose for man is not so s ...

Lady Jane, a 17-year-old put on the throne for nine days in an attempted coup in 1553, is also a heroine in the vividly partisan ...

in the early 1560s, is neater, if lower, than Udall’s play. (The grandmother’s needle, lost when mending the breeches of Hodge, ...

despite the seven-foot lines in which it was written and the stiff moral allegory prefixed to each book. Many of the original po ...

Veronese), Prague, Poland and Holland. Here William the Silent offered to marry his daughter to Sidney, in a Protestant alliance ...

oracle is technically fulfilled; yet all ends well.Arcadia is high-spirited play – its persons are princes, its plot improbable, ...

Grant,O dear, on knees I pray’ – (Knees on ground he then did stay) ‘That not I, but since I love you, Time and place for me may ...

poetry (that is, literature) imitates the golden Idea, what should be, rather than the br azen actuality, what is. It delights a ...

Edmund Spenser Henry’s closing of religious houses had caused what Ascham called ‘the collapse and ruination’ of schools; Sir Th ...

Spenser’s adoption of chivalric romance as the form of his epic. Medieval Arthurianism had enjoyed a new popularity in Italy at ...

Spenser’s craft is the admiration of poets. Canto I, Book I ofThe Faerie Queene begins: A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plai ...