The salon and English letters

It is one of the venerable commonplaces of criticism that ‘manners,’ as distinct from romance and the idealistic interpretation of life, make the bulk of eighteenth century lite...

The one unfailing characteristic of the salon, in all ages and in all countries, is the dominant position which it gives to woman. It is woman who creates the peculiar atmospher...

A salon is not a mere literary club. It is something other than a group of men and women gathered in a drawing-room to discuss literature or meet a poet. It aims to exert a crea...

The English visitor was a familiar figure in the Parisian salon. In an age when travellers were studying manners rather than mountains, and preferred the society of philosophers...

The first English salons, broadly so termed, appear in the age of Elizabeth. A tradition of the social patronage of letters was then established which had a short though brillia...

Not the least pleasant of the social gatherings for conversation was the levee, or reception held on rising from bed. The custom was of course adopted by people of fashion in im...

The list of bluestocking ladies given by Hannah More in her poem, _Bas Bleu_, is as follows: ‘Vesey of verse the judge and friend,’ ‘Boscawen sage,’ ‘bright Montagu,’ and Elizab...

The London salon corresponds well enough, in its external aspects, with its Parisian prototype. If we apply the fivefold analysis given in the second chapter of this work, we sh...

Much mischief to the cause of criticism is wrought by the specialists. Investigators in the underworld of forgotten books, to which scholarly competition too frequently drives t...

Above all things Mrs. Montagu longed to send her reputation down to posterity as an acknowledged patron of letters. She wished to attach to herself, after the manner of the Fren...

The London salon did not pass away without leaving behind it serious criticisms by serious people who knew it well. Thus Wraxall, writing of Mrs. Montagu’s later assemblies, ass...

Chapters like this usually begin with a lament. The age of conversation, it is proper to begin, is gone, gone with the harpsichord and the minuet and the long, leisurely evening...

The golden age of English letter-writing arrived without a period of long and painful preparation. With the more rudimentary correspondence of the seventeenth century, the new a...

The Diary of Fanny Burney cannot, like the conversation of Johnson and the correspondence of Walpole, be cited as perhaps the finest specimen of its kind. Of the arts we are dis...

It is the privilege of few men in any age to raise an art to such perfection that it becomes in effect a new thing. The development of intimate biography is still largely the wo...