The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's; With Other Essays

(3.) A third consideration, however, administers a kind of corrective to the last. It is that, though the last consideration is not unimportant, its importance practically, and...

Among all the vast angelic population three or four individuals stood pre-eminent and unapproachable. These were the Archangels. Satan was one of these: if not the highest Archa...

In consequence of the ravages of the Great Plague in 1665 and the subsequent disaster of the Great Fire in 1666 there was for some time a total cessation in London of theatrical...

For twelve years--that is, from 1714 to 1726--Swift did not quit Ireland. At his first coming, as he tells us in one of his letters, he was "horribly melancholy;" but the melanc...

We have no doubt the opinion thus expressed by the scapegrace young earl was very general. Dryden's own prose disquisitions on the principles of poetry may have helped to diffus...

It was pre-eminently clear that the forthcoming literature would be Royalist and anti-Puritan. With the exception of Milton, there was not one man of known literary power whose...

He knew this, he says, by "certain vital signs" discernible in what he had already written. What were those "vital signs," those proofs indubitable to Milton that he had the art...

This effect of civilization in reducing all our sensations to those of comfort is a somewhat alarming circumstance in the point of view we are now taking. It is necessary, for m...

Ugh! what a discord! The tone, the voice, the words, the very metre, so horribly out of tune with what had gone before! Mephistopheles is the speaker. He has been standing behin...

_Ben Jonson's own Sketch of Shakespeare._--"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blott...

Whoever has read these sentences attentively, and penetrated their meaning in connexion, will see that they reveal a mode of thought somewhat resembling that which we have attri...

The first five of the following Essays are reprinted from the Author's _Essays Biographical and Critical: chiefly on English Poets_, published in 1856. The present Volume and tw...

In the year 1726 Swift, then in his sixtieth year, and in the full flush of his new popularity as the champion of Irish nationality, visited England for the first time since Que...

_Claudio._ Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe...

Thus, passing and repassing between Laracor and London, now lording it over his Irish parishioners, and now filling the literary and Whig haunts of the great metropolis with the...

A glance at the external circumstances of Goethe's life alone (and what a contrast there is between the abundance of biographic material respecting Goethe and the scantiness of...

A while ago this used to be spoken of as the Golden or Augustan age of English literature. We do not talk in that manner now. We feel that when we get among the authors of the t...

The history of English literature affords some curious illustrations of this law. It has always puzzled historians, for example, to account for such a great unoccupied gap in ou...

Those of Dryden's writings which were produced during the twelve years of his life subsequent to the Revolution constitute an important part of his literary remains, not merely...

Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged some of them, never collected them, and suffered them to find their way about the world as chance, demand, and the piracy...

[7] _British Quarterly Review_, October 1854.--1. "The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century." A Series of Lectures. By W. M. Thackeray. London: 1853. 2. "The Life of Swi...