324 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



the nations most significant in the history of literary science, and 

 indicate a few of the leaders of each period of advance; I shall then 

 read in detail some portion of the treatment of individual countries ; 

 and finally, I shall attempt to characterize the literary science which 

 they have together assisted to construct. 



I. THE GENERAL STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT 



While chronological limits can never be definitely assigned to 

 literary movements, and while the movements in cross-section of 

 Germany, England, and France do not exactly jibe (since often one 

 is, in some degree, the resultant of conditions precedent beyond the 

 national border), it appears that in general the Preparatory Period 

 of the present tendency of literary study ended about 1795-1800, 

 and was reconstructive of the contributory disciplines; that the 

 Second Period embraced the first thirty years of the nineteenth 

 century, and was romantic in theory, encyclopedic in method; that 

 the Third Period, the historico-philosophical, is still existent; but its 

 representatives have, on the one hand, wandered temporarily into 

 non-social, and therefore unreal by-paths and magic woods, heights 

 Parnassian, hyper-aesthetic, hedonistic; they have, on the other 

 hand, availed themselves more or less of the genetic, dynamic, eido- 

 graphic methods of modern science, and so developed in all the 

 countries under review a system of comparative inquiry by means 

 of which a science of literature, or literary philology, bids fair to be 

 established. 



In the reconstructive period, Winckelmann, Kant, Herder and 

 Lessing, Goethe and Schiller led in Germany; -Bentley (as far back 

 as 1697), Burke, Hogarth, Lord Kaimes, Hume, the Wartons, Kurd, 

 Cowper, Goldsmith, Tyrwhitt and Pye, Macpherson and Percy were 

 among the pioneers in England; in France the prophets were Per- 

 rault (1668), Diderot, Rousseau, Buff on. 



The romantic and encyclopedic period in German criticism was 

 stamped by the genius of Wolf, Boeckh, Solger, the Schlegels, and 

 others of whom I shall speak; the English period was that of Words- 

 worth and Coleridge, Bowles, Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Hazlitt, and 

 Shelley; the fates of France were in the hands of Mme. de Stae'l and 

 Chateaubriand, Baour-Lormian, Stendhal, Hugo, Cousin, Michelet, 

 and others. 



The historico-philosophical period in Germany I shall describe in 

 detail; the Grimms, von Humboldt, and Bopp are in the lead, Hegel, 

 Carriere, and others; in England, there is the age of Henry Hallam, 

 of Carlyle, De Quincey, and Macaulay (later of Morris, Ruskin, and 

 Arnold, from whom by combination and permutation are descended 

 Pater and Symonds) ; in France we find Villemain, St. Marc Girardin, 



