The Pageant Of English Prose

Author : Robert Maynard Leonard
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331150084
Total Pages : 778 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (5 download)

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Download or read book The Pageant of English Prose written by Robert Maynard Leonard and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-26 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Pageant of English Prose: Being Five Hundred Passages by Three Hundred and Twenty-Five Authors This collection of specimens of English prose is a companion volume to The Pageant of English Poetry. It consists of 500 passages by 325 authors, ranging, from John de Trevisa (1326) to 'Fiona Macleod' (1905), over a period of upwards of five centuries. With all English prose as one's province, the difficulty of selection is obvious, but it must not be hastily supposed that short passages cannot do justice to an author. Sir Walter Ralegh is not the only one of whom it may be said, in Mr. Edmund Gosse's words, 'he is essentially to be read in extracts and admired in purple patches.' Sir Sidney Colvin says of Landor, for instance: 'His perfect instinct for the rhythms and harmonies of prose reveals itself as fully in three lines as in a hundred.' It is indeed surprising how often an author's characteristics may be as adequately shown in a paragraph as in half a dozen pages. The authors have been placed in alphabetical order, as in The Pageant of English Poetry; experience having shown that this arrangement possesses a balance of advantages. No one reads an anthology such as this at one fell swoop, from cover to cover. It is a book to be dipped into as opportunity offers, or fancy dictates; and the alphabetical order, supplemented by a chronological list of authors and proper indexes, is by far the most convenient for casual consultation. A pageant is not necessarily a procession: it may be simply a display in which a great variety is shown. 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.