Category: Classics of Literature
John Dryden was born August 9, 1631, at Aldwinkle All Saints, between Thrapston and Oundle, in Northamptonshire. He was the grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, of Canons Ashby, in the same county; and his father possessed a small landed property, which he transmitted to t...
John Dryden was born August 9, 1631, at Aldwinkle All Saints, between Thrapston and Oundle, in Northamptonshire. He was the grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, of Canons As...
2. CHAPTER II.The contemporary of Dryden who approached him most nearly in satiric force, and, generally speaking, in the borderland between poetry and prose, was John Oldham (1653-1683). Not...
3. CHAPTER III.It is entirely in keeping with the solid and terrestrial character of Restoration literature in general, that no description of poetry should manifest so grievous a lapse from t...
4. CHAPTER IV.Dryden occupies an unique position as by far the most important representative of a department of literature for which, on his own showing, he had little natural qualification,...
5. CHAPTER V.After Dryden, the metrical dramatists of the Restoration, as of other epochs, may be accurately divided into two classes, the poets and the playwrights. As was to be expected in...
6. CHAPTER VI.Etheredge's comedies serve to introduce one of the most brilliant schools of English comic writing--faulty, in that so far from correcting the manners of its age, it did not eve...
7. CHAPTER VII.The age of the Restoration possessed many men qualified to shine in criticism, but their acumen is in general only indicated by casual remarks, and, setting aside the metrical p...
8. CHAPTER VIII.From the criticism of books we pass, by no violent transition, to the criticism of principles--moral science. The latter half of the seventeenth century is a distinguished perio...
9. CHAPTER IX.The hinge of the controversies on government which agitated England in the seventeenth century, and produced the great treatises of Locke and Algernon Sidney, was a feeble book...
10. CHAPTER X.History is one of the departments of literature in which it is easiest to approach the unsurpassable perfection of antiquity. Poets must in general be accepted as inspiring infl...
11. CHAPTER XI.Two private diarists, whose autobiographic records remained unknown to their contemporaries, have justly obtained classic rank by the publication of their records in the ninetee...
12. CHAPTER XII.Passing from the biographers of divines to the divines themselves, we observe that, with the signal exception of _Pilgrim's Progress_, nearly all the writers in this department...
13. CHAPTER XIII.So great an endowment is genius, that neither the effect produced nor the fame achieved by all the eloquent and learned divines of Charles II.'s age can be for an instant compar...
14. CHAPTER XIV.The most important part of the posthumous papers of Samuel Butler, the discovery of which in the eighteenth century has been mentioned, was his _Characters_, composed upon the m...
15. CHAPTER XV.The pursuit of antiquarianism has always flourished in England since her inhabitants have enjoyed sufficient culture to be aware that they possessed a past. Even the poetry of L...
16. CHAPTER XVI.Travel was well represented in the literature of the period, as could hardly be otherwise in an age distinguished by the awakening of a spirit of curiosity and intelligent inqui...