Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into a smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very few corrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader will all too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than in arg...
By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into a smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very few corrections and additions) as they were del...
3. Part 3But shall we now look more carefully into these twin questions of perspicuity and accuracy: for I think pursuing them, we may almost reach the philosophic kernel of good writing...
4. Part 4Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries--the pipe, the lute, the tabor, the chorus with its dance movem...
9. Part 9When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find the effective miracle, making the...
2. Part 2(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said) they cannot in their nature be re...
10. Part 10Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord sha...
6. Part 6Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius. Just here it is rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, genius overcame it; yet warn you how r...
15. Part 15There remains a second question--How happened it that Cambridge, after admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair of Latin, and that a Chair of Eng...
8. Part 8It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that there was no way for him but death. And when...
12. Part 12Consider those lines; then consider how long it took the inhabitants of this island--the cultured ones who count as readers or writers--to recapture just that note of urbanity....
13. Part 13I do not ask you to doubt that the barbarian invaders from the north, with their myths and legends, brought new and most necessary blood of imagination into the literary materia...
11. Part 11I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England to be sung, this note of Carducci's we cannot decently or honestly strike. Great lives have been bled away...
16. Part 16_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas..._ Is it possible, Gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, three or more of the acknowledged masterpieces of literature...
5. Part 5Further I avow to your Highness that with these eyes I have beheld the person of William Wooton, B.D., who has written a good sizeable volume against a friend of your Governor (...
7. Part 7Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to b...
14. Part 14Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that great city, should have possessed...