Lays Of Ancient Rome With Selections From The Essays

Author : Thomas Babington Macaulay
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781440034855
Total Pages : 554 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (348 download)

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Download or read book Lays of Ancient Rome written by Thomas Babington Macaulay and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Lays of Ancient Rome: Essays and Poems Introduction to their Everyman reprint of the Lays of Ancient Rome and the Miscellanies here combined in one volume. Of the Miscellanies in verse and prose, published the year after his death, I shall speak later. But the Lays of Ancient Rome, with Ivry and The Armada, had been published by Macaulay himself nearly twenty years before(1842). Matthew Arnold and others attacked the Lays, judging them by the irrelevant standard of the highest flights of poetry. But judged for what they are, ballads, they are masterly, and deserved the immense popularity they enjoyed with two generations of Englishmen. In those days ever 1 schoolboy knew them, and many both young and old had them by heart. From them young people learnt to take pleasure in the sound and rhythm of verse, which helped them later to enjoy other greater poets. I do not think that the oblivion into which the Lays have since fallen has been an advantage to literature. It is absurd to look in Macaulays Lays for the highest qualities and subtlest tones of lyrical poetry, and to cry out on him as a Philistine because they are not there. Such an outcry is not criticism. Why look for grapes on a fig-tree? But it is to be oneself strangely insensitive, not to respond to the trumpet call that rings in the thirty-sixth stanza of Lake Regillus, or to the stir of a nation rising in the Armada night. Noris the vigour of narrative style the only merit of the Lays: Macaulay has succeeded in giving an emotional value to names, places, ancient customs, and forms of life and to all the lore of the antiquary and the historian. In this way he made the English public for two generations more lovingly familiar with the names and legends of the ancient Roman Republic than they are ever likely to be under more modern tutoring. 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.