New Developments in Prose - Religious writers Donne, Taylor, Baxter, Borrow, South- - Sir Thomas Browne Dryden's plays, poems, and prose Developments in Restoration drama The Heroic Play Restoration Comedy: Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Shadwell and others - Restoration Tragedy: Davenant and others, Lee, General qualities of Restoration prose Cowley, Temple, Bunyan, Halifax - Religious writers Philosophical writers: The Spirit of Augustan literature Johnson, Boswell, THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE. Form and spirit of eighteenth-century poetry Thomson, Shenstone, and minors New forces - Gray, Collins, Cowper - The revival of romance Ossian, Percy The full tide of romanticism — Coleridge, Wordsworth, MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH Rise of the Reviews - Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham The novel of sentiment and terror Mackenzie, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Beckford Scott and the historical novel· Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, Disraeli, Bulwer, Lever, Tennyson, the Brownings, Swinburne, William Morris, Rossetti, James Thomson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Chief characteristics - Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude - Other historians Newman, Mill-Scientific writers Lockhart and other biographers - Criticism: Matthew Arnold, Swin- A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST Cædmon Bede, Alfred, Elfric. The earliest English poetry. Beowulf Christian poetry and Cynewulf Early English prose It is customary to classify Old English, or, to use the more Old popular term, Anglo-Saxon, poetry under two heads, pagan English and Christian, according as it finds its subjects in the legends Poetry. of Teutonic heathendom or, after the introduction of Christianity, in biblical story and ecclesiastical ritual and tradition. The classification is a just one, although it may obscure, if too strictly interpreted, one of the most interesting things in Old English poetry-the curious mingling in the same poem of pagan and Christian elements. The pagan poems, for reasons which will soon appear, have often a colouring of Christian sentiment, while the poems on biblical themes do not break so completely with the heathen narratives as not to adopt something of their method and spirit. The tribes who invaded and occupied England in the fifth and sixth centuries were heathen marauders from Denmark and the north coast of Germany. They belonged to that group of nations whose civilization Tacitus describes in his Germania. Of their literature at the time of the invasion we know nothing directly, but we can infer from the poems which remain that there were current among them songs and lays telling of the great deeds of the warriors and kings of the Teutonic world. These hero-songs were handed on orally from generation to generation, and were recited by minstrels or scops at tribal or festive gatherings. Not many of them have survived; doubtless a few only were written down, at a later time when the art of writing was acquired from Irish and Roman missionaries. The poem Widsith, which in its first form may belong to the fourth century-for additions were made to it from time to time to keep it up to date-is not itself a hero-song, but rather a list of the great kings whose deeds were the themes of such songs. It tells of the wanderings of a scop among the Teutonic tribes. Deor's Lament is also the story of a minstrel, in which reference is made, by way of illustration, to well-known names and legends. Of hero-songs proper there survive two fragments, Finnsburh B |