: From Chaucer to Tennyson With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors by Beers Henry A Henry Augustin - English literature History and criticism

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LIST OF PORTRAITS.

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, EDMUND SPENSER, FRANCIS BACON, JOHN MILTON

JOHN DRYDEN, JOSEPH ADDISON, ALEXANDER POPE, JONATHAN SWIFT

SAMUEL JOHNSON, OLIVER GOLDSMITH, WILLIAM COWPER, ROBERT BURNS

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, GEORGE GORDON BYRON, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, JOHN KEATS

ROBERT SOUTHEY, SIR WALTER SCOTT, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

THOMAS CARLYLE, JOHN RUSKIN, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, CHARLES DICKENS

GEORGE ELIOT , JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, ROBERT BROWNING, ALFRED TENNYSON

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER.

The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.

The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the Continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.

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