The World’s Classics

CCVI

ENGLISH
CRITICAL ESSAYS
NINETEENTH CENTURY

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG
COPENHAGEN NEW YORK TORONTO
MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY
CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE
UNIVERSITY

ENGLISH
CRITICAL ESSAYS
NINETEENTH CENTURY

SELECTED AND EDITED BY
EDMUND D. JONES

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD

The present selection of English Critical Essays (NineteenthCentury) was first published in ‘The World’s Classics’in 1916 and reprinted in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1928.

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PREFACE[v]

The essays here brought together are meant toillustrate English literary criticism during the nineteenthcentury. A companion volume representativeof Renaissance and Neo-classic criticism will,it is hoped, be issued at a future date. Meanwhilethis volume may well go forth alone. For the nineteenthcentury forms an epoch in English literaturewhose beginnings are more clearly definedthan those of most literary epochs. The publicationof the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and of Wordsworth’sPreface to the second edition in 1800, showthe Romantic Movement grown conscious and deliberate,with results that have coloured the wholestream of English poetry and criticism ever since.

The greater part of the present collection dealswith general principles rather than with criticismsof individual books or authors. The nineteenthcentury, having discarded the dogmas and ‘rules’of Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigateafresh the Theory of Poetry, and though no systematictreatment of the subject in all its bearingsappeared, some valuable contributions were made,the most notable of which came from the poetsthemselves.[vi]

The extracts from the Biographia Literaria areplaced next to the Wordsworthian doctrineswhich they criticize; otherwise the arrangementof the essays is chronological.

American criticism is represented—inadequately,but, it is hoped, not unworthily—by the last twoessays.

In the preparation of this volume I have receivedmuch valuable help from Mr. J. C. Smith,which I now gratefully acknowledge.

Edmund D. Jones.

CONTENTS[vii]