Milton:-College Exercise; His Native Language Royal Resolutions Nevile-Plato Redivivus; Revolution in France Same Subject Burke:-Vindication of Natural Society; Democracy Thoughts on the Present Discontents; House of Commons Speech on Nabob of Arcot; Devastation of the Carnatic Conversation; Meeting on the Road to Emmaus Darwin-Botanic Garden; "Flowers of the Sky" The Vision (part) "My Father was a Farmer" Highland Mary CORRECTIONS. VOL. II. Page 17, line 28; for "in prison " read " from prison." 32, line 13; for "eighty " read "seventy." 41, line 5 from foot; for "Churchhill" read "Churchill." 73, line 7; for "Heptaglotten" read “Heptaglotton.” ,, 105, line 14 from foot; and p. 106, lines 5 and 16; for "Etheridge' read "Etherege." 105, line 13 from foot; and p. 106, lines 9, 10, and 17; for "Wycherly" read "Wycherley." ,, 120, line 28; for "Milton's " read "Bunyan's." 147, line 31; p. 149, line 12; p. 150, lines 24 and 25; p. 151, line 5 from foot; p. 152, line 17; and p. 174, line 7 from foot; for "Spratt" read "Sprat." ,, 172, line 22; for "Etheredge" read "Etherege." ,, 279, line 21; for "Her" read "His." ,, 334, line 3 from foot; dele "known to be." 432, line 5; after "published" add "anonymously.” ,, 468, line 3; for "stanzas " read "stanza." 537, line 14; for "eight" read "six." HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. MIDDLE AND LATTER PART OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. EXCLUDING from our view the productions of the last fifty or sixty years, as not yet ripe for the verdict of history, we may affirm that our national literature, properly so called, that is, whatever of our literature by right of its poetic shape or spirit is to be held as peculiarly belonging to the language and the country, had its noonday in the period comprehending the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century. But a splendid afternoon flush succeeded this meridian blaze, which may be said to have lasted for another half century, or longer. Down almost to the Revolution, or at least to the middle of the reign of Charles II., our higher literature continued to glow with more or less of the coloured light and the heart of fire which it had acquired in the age of Elizabeth and James. Some of the greatest of it indeed-as the verse of Milton and the prose poetry of Jeremy Taylor-was not given to the world till towards the close of the space we have just indicated. But Milton, and Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Cudworth, and Henry More, and Cowley, the most eminent of our English writers in the interval from the Restoration to the Revolution (if we except Dryden, the founder of a new school, and Barrow, whose writings, full as they are of thought, have not much of the poetical or untranslatable) were all of them, it is worthy of observation, born before the close of the reign of James I. Nor VOL. II. B |