Historical Manual Of English Prosody Classic Reprint

Author : George Saintsbury
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331989882
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (898 download)

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Download or read book A History of English Prosody, Vol. 1 written by George Saintsbury and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-26 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A History of English Prosody, Vol. 1: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day The proposed enquiry, which the writer has meditated for a good many years, and which, a little helped but more hindered by his earlier professional duties as a critic and journalist, has become an actual part of his later work as a professor of literature, is devoted to a subject entirely neglected for some centuries of our literary history. Treated partially and sporadically during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, and never attempted as a whole until Mitford's essay towards the end of this last, it has during the nineteenth been pursued with increasing attention; but too often in the fashion of shreds and patches, and almost always with a view to enforcing and illustrating preconceived ideas on certain points. The most famous instance of this is of course Dr. Guest's History of English Rhythms. No book known to me in English, except the two just specified, attempts a complete historical examination up to its own tune; and while Mitford's, good as it is, is perhaps injured by prejudice and certainly by necessary imperfection of knowledge, the conclusions drawn at every page by Guest from his admirable collection and digestion of material, almost deserve Southey's contemporary dismissal of them as "worthless." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.