The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Nineteenth Century Literature
(1780-1895), by George Saintsbury
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Title: A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)
Author: George Saintsbury
Release Date: March 19, 2010 [EBook #31698]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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A HISTORY
OF
NINETEENTH CENTURY
LITERATURE
(1780-1895)
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH
_New York_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1896,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped, January, 1896. Reprinted October,
1896; August, 1898; September, 1899; April, 1902; March, 1904;
November, 1906.
_Norwood Press_
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years
ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some
difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to
myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my
immediate predecessor in grappling with the period between 1660 and
1780.
The most obvious and serious of these was the question, "What should be
done with living authors?" Independently of certain perils of selection
and exclusion, of proportion and of freedom of speech, I believe it will
be recognised by every one who has ever attempted it, that to mix
estimates of work which is done and of work which is unfinished is to
the last degree unsatisfactory. I therefore resolved to include no
living writer, except Mr. Ruskin, in this volume for the purpose of
detailed criticism, though some may be now and then mentioned in
passing.
Even with this limitation the task remained a rather formidable one.
Those who are least disposed to overvalue literary work in proportion as
it approaches their own time will still acknowledge t
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