Search -
The Works of William Ernest Henley: Poems
The Works of William Ernest Henley Poems Author:William Ernest Henley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: N. ' HENRY FIELDING ing. If to be a Good Buffalo be all that—(and in Harry Fielding's case it is all that, and more)— why, then, I can't help wishing that ... more »the breed were more prolific ; and even that M. Henri Taine had himself belonged to it. I shall say nothing about the four great books, for The Four the very simple reason that everything there is to reat s' say about them has been said. Like Dickens's work, and Scott's, but, as is inevitable and natural, to a still greater extent, as yet they are as essential a component in the mighty fabric of our Literature as the plays and poems of Shakespeare, or the poetry of Spenser and Milton, and Gibbon and John Bunyan, and Defoe's half-failures, and Mr. Bos- well's biography. And when I say that to consider them: in all their stately shapeliness of plan, their admirable completeness of structure, their reasoned prodigality of detail and adornment: is for me about the same, neither more nor less, than considering St. Paul's, which I esteem the piece of architecture the nearest to perfection these eyes of mine have seen, it will be apprehended, I hope, that I keep not silence out of irreverence. But everybody worth mentioning—(as Lady Mary, Gibbon, Gray, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mr. Lang, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury,1) has spoken : and 1 Whose notes on Fielding are edifying and sagacious in no mean degree : especially the passages in which he deals with Mr. Jones's relations to Lady Bellaston, and seeks to explain Dr. Johnson's dislike of Fielding. Thackeray's view was distorted and obscured by the fact that (a) he was so terrible a Sentimentalist that he thought Amelia Sedley and Laura Bell ideals for which to live and die ; (b) that he considered Fielding the Man ...« less