Mr, Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. ii 



A SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



1780-1830. 



By OLIVER ELTON, 



Professor of P2nglish Literature in the University of Liverpool. 

 Author of " Modern Studies," etc. 



In Two Volumes. Demy Svo. 21s. net. 



This " Survey " is not so much a history as a critical review in an 

 historical setting. It does not profess to be a chronicle of thought, 

 or, in the first instance, of literary currents and tendencies, though 

 these are kept in mind throughout and are summarized in the first 

 and last chapters. The book is above all a series of personal 

 impressions and valuations of artists and of their works, and it deals 

 with the half-century of English Literature which opens with the 

 first work of Blake and Cowper and closes with the last years of 

 Scott. It includes both poetry and prose, and falls into twenty-six 

 chapters. To each of the greater writers, as a rule, the whole or 

 the best part of a chapter is devoted ; for instance, to Blake, 

 Cowper, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley among the poets ; 

 to Scott among the novelists ; to De Quincey, Lamb, and Hazlitt 

 among the critics ; and to Burke among philosophers. The lesser 

 writers are often discussed along with those in whose orbits they 

 move; thus the revival of the ballad is noticed in the chapter on 

 Scott's poetry, Frere's " Whistlecraft " in that on Byron, and Hartley 

 and Sara Coleridge together with their father. The remaining 

 names are grouped ; fiction, apart from Scott, falling into three 

 chapters, the " official reviewers " into one, the " other poets " into 

 two, and so forth. The author has not scrupled to dwell more fully 

 than is usual on figures that seem undeservedly ignored, such as 

 Beckford, Maturin, or John Hamilton Reynolds. But here and 

 throughout he his been moved in the choice and proportioning of 

 his material, not by antiquarian considerations or simple curiosity, 

 but by the wish to give an account of those who, as he puts it in his 

 Preface, " have spoken to him in any kind of living voice." Many 

 references and illustrations, which would have been out of place in 

 the text, are gathered into notes at the end of each volume, and 

 there is an index. 



