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From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth Century England
From Classic to Romantic Premises of Taste in Eighteenth Century England Author:Walter Jackson Bate A very learned and a very thoughtful book -- a treasury of documentation and a model of dialectic exposition. I do not know any other book which so richly and yet so economically narrates the rise of feeling and association during the eighteenth century and the imperfect triumph of these new ideas in the empirically conservative mind of English... more » romanticism.
Professor Bate treats the history of ideas not as an assemblage of defunct museum pieces but as a sequence of living moments in the drama of human thinking. It is clear that Addison and Johnson, Alison, Kames and Erasmus Darwin, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have a real meaning for Professor Bate -- today. It is easy to underestimate both the importance and the difficulty of this kind of engagement on the part of the historical scholar.