Robert huntington fletcher biography of donald

A History of English Literature. Robert Huntington Fletcher. Robert Huntington Fletcher's 'A History of English Literature' is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the development of English literature from its early beginnings to the modern period. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students alike, providing in-depth coverage of major literary movements, authors, and works.

Elizabeth, Defeat of the Armada, Wyatt and Surrey, about Prose Fiction. Lyric poetry, including sonnet sequences. John Donne. The Drama. Classical and native influences. Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe. Shakspere, Ben Jonson and other dramatists. The Seventeenth Century, Cavaliers and Puritans. The Civil War and the Commonwealth. The Drama, to Francis Bacon.

The King James Bible, Lyric Poets. Cavalier and Puritan poets. Milton, Charles II, James II, to the Revolution in William and Mary, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope, Johnson, Burke, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Revolutionary Novels of Purpose. Miss Austen. Gray, Macpherson, Ossianic imitations. Burns, Sentimental Comedy.

Domestic Tragedy. Revival of genuine Comedy of Manners. The Romantic Triumph, to about Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Macaulay, Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Dickens, Browning, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, George Eliot, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Morris, Reade, Swinburne, Trollope, Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Kipling, Lippincott Co.

The short biographies of many of the chief English authors in the English Men of Letters Series Macmillan, 30 and 75 cents a volume are generally admirable. For appreciative criticism of some of the great poets the essays of Lowell and of Matthew Arnold are among the best. It is much to be desired that students should have at hand for consultation some good short history of England, such as that of S.

Gardiner Longmans, Green, and Co. The two earliest of the nine main divisions of English Literature are by far the longest—taken together are longer than all the others combined—but we shall pass rather rapidly over them. This is partly because the amount of thoroughly great literature which they produced is small, and partly because for present-day readers it is in effect a foreign literature, written in early forms of English or in foreign languages, so that to-day it is intelligible only through special study or in translation.

The present English race has gradually shaped itself out of several distinct peoples which successively occupied or conquered the island of Great Britain. The earliest one of these peoples which need here be mentioned belonged to the Celtic family and was itself divided into two branches. The Goidels or Gaels were settled in the northern part of the island, which is now Scotland, and were the ancestors of the present Highland Scots.

On English literature they exerted little or no influence until a late period. The Britons, from whom the present Welsh are descended, inhabited what is now England and Wales; and they were still further subdivided, like most barbarous peoples, into many tribes which were often at war with one another. Though the Britons were conquered and chiefly supplanted later on by the Anglo-Saxons, enough of them, as we shall see, were spared and intermarried with the victors to transmit something of their racial qualities to the English nation and literature.

The characteristics of the Britons, which are those of the Celtic family as a whole, appear in their history and in the scanty late remains of their literature. Two main traits include or suggest all the others: first, a vigorous but fitful emotionalism which rendered them vivacious, lovers of novelty, and brave, but ineffective in practical affairs; second, a somewhat fantastic but sincere and delicate sensitiveness to beauty.

Into impetuous action they were easily hurried; but their momentary ardor easily cooled into fatalistic despondency. To the mysterious charm of Nature—of hills and forests and pleasant breezes; to the loveliness and grace of meadow-flowers or of a young man or a girl; to the varied sheen of rich colors—to all attractive objects of sight and sound and motion their fancy responded keenly and joyfully; but they preferred chiefly to weave these things into stories and verse of supernatural romance or vague suggestiveness; for substantial work of solider structure either in life or in literature they possessed comparatively little faculty.

Robert huntington fletcher biography of donald

More yellow was her head than the flowers of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheeks were redder than the reddest roses.

Who beheld her was filled with her love. Pour white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen. This charming fancifulness and delicacy of feeling is apparently the great contribution of the Britons to English literature; from it may perhaps be descended the fairy scenes of Shakspere and possibly to some extent the lyrical music of Tennyson.

Of the Roman conquest and occupation of Britain England and Wales we need only make brief mention, since it produced virtually no effect on English literature. The fact should not be forgotten that for over three hundred years, from the first century A. But the interest of the Romans in the island was centered on other things than writing, and the great bulk of the Britons themselves seem to have been only superficially affected by the Roman supremacy.

At the end of the Roman rule, as at its beginning, they appear divided into mutually jealous tribes, still largely barbarous and primitive. The Anglo-Saxons. Meanwhile across the North Sea the three Germanic tribes which were destined to form the main element in the English race were multiplying and unconsciously preparing to swarm to their new home.

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes occupied territories in the region which includes parts of the present Holland, of Germany about the mouth of the Elbe, and of Denmark. They were barbarians, living partly from piratical expeditions against the northern and eastern coasts of Europe, partly from their flocks and herds, and partly from a rude sort of agriculture.

At home they seem to have sheltered themselves chiefly in unsubstantial wooden villages, easily destroyed and easily abandoned; For the able-bodied freemen among them the chief occupation, as a matter of course, was war. Strength, courage, and loyalty to king and comrades were the chief virtues that they admired; ferocity and cruelty, especially to other peoples, were necessarily among their prominent traits when their blood was up; though among themselves there was no doubt plenty of rough and ready companionable good-humor.

Their bleak country, where the foggy and unhealthy marshes of the coast gave way further inland to vast and somber forests, developed in them during their long inactive winters a sluggish and gloomy mood, in which, however, the alternating spirit of aggressive enterprise was never quenched. For the people on whom they fell these barbarians were a pitiless and terrible scourge; yet they possessed in undeveloped form the intelligence, the energy, the strength—most of the qualities of head and heart and body—which were to make of them one of the great world-races.

The process by which Britain became England was a part of the long agony which transformed the Roman Empire into modern Europe. In the fourth century A. But early in the fifth century the Romans, hard-pressed even in Italy by other barbarian invaders, withdrew all their troops and completely abandoned Britain. Not long thereafter, and probably before the traditional date of , the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons began to come in large bands with the deliberate purpose of permanent settlement.

Their conquest, very different in its methods and results from that of the Romans, may roughly be said to have occupied a hundred and fifty or two hundred years. The earlier invading hordes fixed themselves at various points on the eastern and southern shore and gradually fought their way inland, and they were constantly augmented by new arrivals.

In general the Angles settled in the east and north and the Saxons in the south, while the less numerous Jutes, the first to come, in Kent, soon ceased to count in the movement. In this way there naturally came into existence a group of separate and rival kingdoms, which when they were not busy with the Britons were often at war with each other.

The resistance of the Britons to the Anglo-Saxon advance was often brave and sometimes temporarily successful. Early in the sixth century, for example, they won at Mount Badon in the south a great victory, later connected in tradition with the legendary name of King Arthur, which for many years gave them security from further aggressions. But in the long run their racial defects proved fatal; they were unable to combine in permanent and steady union, and tribe by tribe the newcomers drove them slowly back; until early in the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons were in possession of nearly all of what is now England, the exceptions being the regions all along the west coast, including what has ever since been, known as Wales.

Of the Roman and British civilization the Anglo-Saxons were ruthless destroyers, exulting, like other barbarians, in the wanton annihilation of things which they did not understand. Every city, or nearly every one, which they took, they burned, slaughtering the inhabitants. They themselves occupied the land chiefly as masters of scattered farms, each warrior established in a large rude house surrounded by its various outbuildings and the huts of the British slaves and the Saxon and British bondmen.

In the natural course of events, however, no sooner had the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the imperfect and partial civilization of their predecessors than they began to rebuild one for themselves; possessors of a fertile land, they settled down to develop it, and from tribes of lawless fighters were before long transformed into a race of farmer-citizens.

Gradually trade with the Continent, also, was reestablished and grew; but perhaps the most important humanizing influence was the reintroduction of Christianity. Augustine not the famous African saint of that name , who landed in Kent and converted that kingdom. Within the next two generations, and after much fierce fighting between the adherents of the two religions, all the other kingdoms as well had been christianized.

It was only the southern half of the island, however, that was won by the Roman missionaries; in the north the work was done independently by preachers from Ireland, where, in spite of much anarchy, a certain degree of civilization had been preserved. These two types of Christianity, those of Ireland and of Rome, were largely different in spirit.

The Irish missionaries were simple and loving men and won converts by the beauty of their lives; the Romans brought with them the architecture, music, and learning of their imperial city and the aggressive energy which in the following centuries was to make their Church supreme throughout the Western world. When the inevitable clash for supremacy came, the king of the then-dominant Anglian kingdom, Northumbria, made choice of the Roman as against the Irish Church, a choice which proved decisive for the entire island.

And though our personal sympathies may well go to the finer-spirited Irish, this outcome was on the whole fortunate; for only through religious union with Rome during the slow centuries of medieval rebirth could England be bound to the rest of Europe as one of the family of cooperating Christian states; and outside that family she would have been isolated and spiritually starved.

One of the greatest gifts of Christianity, it should be observed, and one of the most important influences in medieval civilization, was the network of monasteries which were now gradually established and became centers of active hospitality and the chief homes of such learning as was possible to the time. The charms explain themselves as an inevitable product of primitive superstition; the ballads probably first sprang up and developed, among all races, in much the following way.

At the very beginning of human society, long before the commencement of history, the primitive groups of savages who then constituted mankind were instinctively led to express their emotions together, communally, in rhythmical fashion. The opening of the work establishes the author's intent to create a comprehensive and clear guide for reading and understanding English literature.

Fletcher discusses the importance of considering both the external conditions that shaped literary movements and the intrinsic qualities of the literature itself. He emphasizes the dual aims of literary study: to grasp the socio-historical context of various literary periods and to appreciate the artistic expression of life and personality through literature.

Notably, the text begins with the early Britons and Anglo-Saxons, highlighting their characteristics and contributions to English literature, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of England's literary heritage in subsequent chapters. This is an automatically generated summary. From private schools Macaulay proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained through the seven years required for the Master's degree.

In spite of his aversion for mathematics, he finally won a 'lay' fellowship, which did not involve residence at the University nor any other obligation, but which almost sufficed for his support during the seven years of its duration. At this time his father failed in his business, and during several years Macaulay was largely occupied with the heavy task of reestablishing it and paying the creditors.

In college he had begun to write in prose and verse for the public literary magazines, and in appeared his essay on Milton, the first of the nearly forty literary, historical, and biographical essays which during the next thirty years or more he contributed to 'The Edinburgh Review. In he was made a Commissioner of Bankruptcy and in he attained the immediate object of his ambition by receiving from a nobleman who controlled it a seat in Parliament.

Here he at once distinguished himself as orator and worker. Heart and soul a Liberal, he took a prominent part in the passage of the first Reform Bill, of , living at the same time a busy social life in titled society. The Ministry rewarded his services with a position on the Board of Control, which represented the government in its relations with the East India Company, and in , in order to earn the fortune which seemed to him essential to his continuance in the unremunerative career of public life, he accepted the position of legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, which carried with it a seat in that Council and a salary of L10, a year.

During the three months voyage to India he 'devoured' and in many cases copiously annotated a vast number of books in 'Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English; folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos. Soon after his return to England he was elected to Parliament as member for Edinburgh, and for two years he was in the Cabinet. Somewhat later the publication of his 'Lays of Ancient Rome' and of his collected essays brought him immense fame as a writer, and in his defeat at Edinburgh for reelection to Parliament gave him time for concentrated labor on the.

To it he thenceforth devoted most of his energies, reading and sifting the whole mass of available source-material and visiting the scenes of the chief historical events. The popular success of the five volumes which he succeeded in preparing and published at intervals was enormous. In he was reelected to Parliament at Edinburgh, but ill-health resulting from his long-continued excessive expenditure of energy warned him that he had not long to live.

He was made a baron in and died in , deeply mourned both because of his manly character and because with him perished mostly unrecorded a knowledge of the facts of English history more minute, probably, than that of any one else who has ever lived. Macaulay never married, but, warm-hearted as he was, always lived largely in his affection for his sisters and for the children of one of them, Lady Trevelyan.

In his public life he displayed as an individual a fearless and admirable devotion to principle, modified somewhat by the practical politician's devotion to party. From every point of view, his character was remarkable, though bounded by his very definite limitations. Least noteworthy among Macaulay's works are his poems, of which the 'Lays of Ancient Rome' are chief.

Here his purpose is to embody his conception of the heroic historical ballads which must have been current among the early Romans as among the medieval English--to recreate these ballads for modern readers. For this sort of verse Macaulay's temperament was precisely adapted, and the 'Lays' present the simple characters, scenes, and ideals of the early Roman republican period with a sympathetic vividness and in stirring rhythms which give them an unlimited appeal to boys.

None the less the 'Lays' really make nothing else so clear as that in the true sense of the word Macaulay was not at all a poet. They show absolutely nothing of the finer feeling which adds so much, for example, to the descriptions in Scott's somewhat similar romances, and they are separated by all the breadth of the world from the realm of delicate sensation and imagination to which Spenser and Keats and all the genuine poets are native-born.

The power of Macaulay's prose works, as no critic has failed to note, rests on his genius as an orator. For oratory he was rarely endowed. The composition of a speech was for him a matter of a few hours; with almost preternatural mental activity he organized and sifted the material, commonly as he paced up and down his garden or his room; then, the whole ready, nearly verbatim, in his mind, he would pass to the House of Commons to hold his colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid eloquence.

Gladstone testified that the announcement of Macaulay's intention to speak was 'like a trumpet call to fill the benches. He realizes characters and situations, on the external side, completely, and conveys his impression to his readers with scarcely any diminution of force. Of expository structure he is almost as great a master as Burke, though in his essays and 'History' the more concrete nature of his material makes him prevailingly a narrator.

He sees and presents his subjects as wholes, enlivening them with realistic details and pictures, but keeping the subordinate parts subordinate and disposing of the less important events in rapid summaries. Of clear and trenchant, though metallic, narrative and expository style he is a master. His sentences, whether long or short, are always lucid; he knows the full value of a short sentence suddenly snapped out after a prolonged period; and no other writer has ever made such' frequent and striking though somewhat monotonous use of deliberate oratorical balance of clauses and strong antithesis, or more illuminating use of vivid resumes.

The best of his essays, like those on the Earl of Chatham and on the two men who won India for England, Clive and Warren Hastings, are models of the comparatively brief comprehensive dissertation of the form employed by Johnson in his 'Lives of the Poets. Macaulay, however, manifests the, defects even of his virtues. His positiveness, fascinating and effective as it is for an uncritical reader, carries with it extreme self-confidence and dogmatism, which render him violently intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events except those that he has formed, and formed sometimes hastily and with prejudice.

The very clearness and brilliancy of his style are often obtained at the expense of real truth; for the force of his sweeping statements and his balanced antitheses often requires much heightening or even distortion of the facts; in making each event and each character stand out in the plainest outline he has often stripped it of its background of qualifying circumstances.

These specific limitations, it will be evident, are outgrowths of his great underlying deficiency--the deficiency in spiritual feeling and insight. Macaulay is a masterly limner of the external side of life, but he is scarcely conscious of the interior world in which the finer spirits live and work out their destinies. Carlyle's description of his appearance is significant: 'I noticed the homely Norse features that you find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself, "Well, any one can see that you are an honest, good sort of fellow, made out of oatmeal.

In dealing with complex or subtle characters he cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which their action sprang; and in his view of history he does not include the underlying and controlling spiritual forces.