A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	The Old English Period	[1]
II.	The Middle English Period	[15]
III.	The Age of Chaucer	[32]
IV.	From Chaucer to Spenser	[57]
V.	The Age of Elizabeth	[87]
VI.	The Age of Milton	[159]
VII.	The Age of Dryden	[190]
VIII.	The Age of Pope	[231]
IX.	The Age of Transition	[281]
X.	The Return to Nature	[362]
XI.	The Victorian Age	[451]
XII.	The Post-Victorian Age	[518]
	General Questions and Exercises	[562]
	Appendix I: General Tables	[581]
	Appendix II: Bibliography	[591]
	Index to Extracts	[601]
	General Index	[607]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Permissions to use copyrighted material have been courteously granted by the following American publishers:

Brentano’s, Inc. for the right to print extracts from the works of Bernard Shaw; E. P. Dutton & Company for Siegfried Sassoon; Duffield & Company for H. G. Wells; Dodd Mead & Company for Rupert Brooke; Harper & Brothers for Thomas Hardy; John W. Luce & Company for J. M. Synge; and Charles Scribner’s Sons for John Galsworthy, and R. L. Stevenson.

We have also obtained from the literary agents of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and J. E. Flecker, permission to use the selections included from these authors. To all the above we wish to express our acknowledgment and thanks.

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

THE BEGINNINGS

Of the actual facts concerning the origin of English literature we know little indeed. Nearly all the literary history of the period, as far as it concerns the lives of actual writers, is a series of skillful reconstructions based on the texts, fortified by some scanty contemporary references (such as those of Bede), and topped with a mass of conjecture. The results, however, are astonishing and fruitful, as will be seen even in the meager summary that appears in the following pages.