Initiation into Literature

Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Fontenelle, Bayle. Of the Eighteenth: Poets: La Motte, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. Prose Writers: Montesquieu, Voltaire,...

Since the seventeenth century it has even been asked if he ever existed and if his poems are not collections of epic songs which had circulated in ancient Greece and which at a...

LATIN LITERATURE.--Latin literature is little more than a branch of Greek literature. It commenced much later, finished earlier, and has always poured into the others at least a...

First Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: Marot, Saint-Gelais; Prose Writers: Rabelais, Comines. Second Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: "The Pleiade"; Prose Writers: Amyot...

POETRY: QUEVERO; GONGORA.--The sixteenth century and the first half at least of the seventeenth century were the golden age of both Spanish and Portuguese literature. In poetry...

THE MIDDLE AGES.--Russia possessed a literature even in the Middle Ages. In the eleventh century the metropolitan Hilarion wrote a discourse on the Old and the New Testament. In...

Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc.: Prose Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of...

WESTERN INFLUENCE--Widely different from Russian literature, much more Western, based more on Greek and Latin culture, Polish literature holds high rank in the histories of Euro...

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.--Italy, after Dante and Petrarch, possessed literary strength and much literary glory in the sixteenth century. She produced an admirable pleiad of poets...

ELIZABETHAN AGE: SPENSER.--In England the Elizabethan Age is the period extending from the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of her successor, James I; that is,...

THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.--In the literature of Germany the eighteenth century, sometimes designated under the title of the age of Frederick the Great, forms a Renaissance...

THE _VEDAS_.--The ancient Indians, who spoke Sanscrit, possess a literature which goes back, perhaps, to the fifteenth century before Christ. At first, like all other races, the...

_CHANSONS DE GESTE_.--The literature of the Middle Ages freed itself from Latin about the tenth century. This was the moment when the great epopees which are called _chansons de...

THE TROUBADOURS.--The Italian literature of the Middle Ages is intimately associated with the literature of the Troubadours in the south of France. To express the case more defi...

THE DRAMA. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, approximately, Spain has exercised less literary influence than in the preceding centuries. Nevertheless Spanish literatu...

COMMENCEMENTS OF SPANISH LITERATURE.--Known Spanish literature does not go back beyond the twelfth century. Like that of the French it began with a _chanson de geste_, and if Fr...

NO RENAISSANCE.--The great originality of Germany from the literary point of view--perhaps, too, from others--is that she _had no renaissance_, no contact, at all events close,...

THE BIBLE.--The Hebrew race possessed a literature from about 1050 B.C. It embodied in poems the legends which had circulated among the people since the most remote epoch of the...

FIRST LITERARY WORK.--The most ancient monument of German literature is the _Song of Hildebrand_, which goes back to an unknown antiquity, perhaps to the ninth century, and a ve...

THE THREE LITERATURES.--In England, prior to the Norman invasion, that is before 1066, England possessed Saxon bards who sang of the prowess of forbears or contemporaries, and m...

LITERARY AWAKENING.--After a long decadence, Italy, less overwhelmed politically than previously, reawoke about 1750. Once more poets came forward: Metastasio, author of tragedi...

First Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: Marot, Saint-Gelais; Prose Writers: Rabelais, Comines. Second Portion of Sixteenth Century: Poets: "The Pleiade"; Prose Writers: Amyot...

Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Fontenelle, Bayle. Of the Eighteenth: Poets: La Motte, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.; Prose Writers: Montesquieu, Voltaire,...

Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc. Prose Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of t...