Critical Essays and Literary Fragments: With an Introduction

Excerpt from Critical Essays and Literary Fragments: With an Introduction

The miscellaneous pieces comprised in this volume are of interest and value, as illustrating the history of English literature and of an important side of English social life, namely, the character and status of the clergy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They have been arranged chronologically under the subjects with which they are respectively concerned. The first three - the excerpt from Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, Sir Philip Sidney's Letter to his brother Robert, and the dissertation from Meres's Palladis Tamia - are, if minor, certainly characteristic examples of pre-Elizabethan and Elizabethan literary criticism. The next three - the Dedicatory Epistle to the Rival Ladies, Howard's Preface to Four New Plays, and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy - not only introduce us to one of the most interesting critical controversies of the seventeenth century, but present us, in the last work, with an epoch-marking masterpiece, both in English criticism and in English prose composition. Bishop Copleston's brochure brings us to the early days of the Edinburgh Review, and to the dawn of the criticism with which we are, unhappily, only too familiar in our own time. From criticism we pass, in the extract from Ellwood's life of himself, to biography and social history, to the most vivid account we have of Milton as a personality and in private life.

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