Excerpt from Teaching the Drama and the Essay And so it comes to pass that great books impart a knowledge of human nature - general and par ticular. They teach us to know man and to know men. How one grows in spiritual and intellectual stature as he reads Macaulay's essay on Milton! He discovers that Cavalier and Puritan are not merely two figures in English history but that they are two eternal human types, and that he himself approximates to one or the otherand possesses cor responding advantages and defects. He sees now as never before that loyalty is sometimes unright cous and that righteousness is sometimes disloyal; that the good man finds it hard to be a tolerant man, and that the man who puts not virtue in the first place will be ultimately overcome. And the great blind poet, hitherto an abstraction, becomes real to him, and like himself a child Of Heaven and' a child of sin, like himself the victim of pain and penury and circumstance, like himself tormented by unrealized ideals and the agony Of unrest. And all this and ever so much more, be it remarked in passing, one may secure from the essay without so much as suspecting that Macaulay wrote balanced sentences. 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.