Excerpt from A History of English Literature, Vol. 1 This volume would have been at least twice as large, it I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages. -publisher's Preface to The Travels Q] Mr. Lemuel Gulliver. Istories of English Literature with an apparatus of portraits and biographies would appear to supply a need which distinguishes a comparatively late phase in English letters. The eighteenth century had advanced some years before such a sentiment as curiosity in regard to the private lives of great authors can be said to have existed. The gradual awakening of some such interest brought in its train a series of classified biographies of poets, dramatists, and novelists. Eventually we arrived at the compilation of elaborate Fasti as represented by the manual of the late Prof. Henry Morley, and from this stage there was rapid progress to what the specialist calls mere history. We are all historians now, and literature lends itself with exceptional ease to historical treatment. History, however, is an extremely ambiguous term. It is used indifferently to signify chrono logical annals, animated pictures, portraits of great men, the confused warrings of dynasties and races, and the still more perplexing conflict of theories, political, ethical, economic, and social. Nor is the difficulty inherent in the word in any degree diminished by its application to literature. Analogy, however, suggests one extremely convenient demarcation of the subject. It prompts us to isolate the subject of origins as bearing the same relation to literature as anthropology bears to history; thus enabling us to start fair with a stablished' nationality and a full-grown vernacular. The histories of our vernacular European literatures are all comparatively brief - five or six centuries at most - and that of England is no exception. Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. That at any rate is the European point of view. Starting with a language and vocabulary in some respects rudimentary, and one or two simpler forms, the historical development proceeds with little break from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.