ENGLISH CLASS-BOOKS Introduction to English Literature. By HENRY S. PANCOAST and PERCY VAN DYKE SHELLEY. net. History of the English Language. By T. B. LOUNSBURY, Professor in Yale University. New and Revised Edition. Crown 8vo. Bell's Short Monographs 5S. net. on Great Writers. Edited by G. C. WILLIAMSON, Litt. D. Pott 8vo. Illustrated. 1s. each. Browning, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dante, Defoe, De Quincey, Dickens, Goldsmith, Johnson, Lamb, Milton, Molière, Shakespeare, Spenser, Horace. Bell's English Texts for Secondary Schools. General Editor, A. GUTHKELCH, M.A., Lecturer in English Language and Literature, King's College, London. Full List of the Series will be found on page 10 of the Catalogue at the end of this book. LONDON: G. BELL & SONS, LTD. OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BY WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON STAFF LECTURER IN LITERATURE TO THE EXTENSION BOARD LONDON G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 1913 PREFACE THE purpose and plan of this little book may easily be gathered from the introductory chapter. Only a few words of preface, therefore, are needed. As I conceive it, a history of English literature, however brief, should still be a history of English literature in fact as well as in name; and for a history something more is required than a list of authors and their books, and even than a chronologically-arranged collection of biographical sketches and critical appreciations. It is true that a nation's literature is made up of the works of individual writers, and that for the ordinary purposes of study these writers may be detached from their surroundings and treated separately. But we cannot get a history of such literature unless and until each one has been put into his place in the sequence of things and considered with reference to that great body of literary production of which his work must now be regarded as a part. A history of English literature, then, must be interested primarily in English literature as a whole. Its chief aim should be to give a clear and systematic account, not of the achievements of successive great writers merely, as such, but of national changes and development. This does not imply neglect of the personal factor. On the contrary, it brings the personal factor into relief; for if each writer is to be considered with reference to literature as a whole, one main subject of enquiry must be the nature and value of his particular contribution to that whole. But it does mean |