The Foreign Debt of English Literature Author:Thomas George Tucker 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: Ill LITERARY CURRENTS OF THE DARK AGES LATIN literature, despite its decline after the classical period, is marked by a number of names which merit eminen... more »ce in their several domains. The era succeeding the silver age hardly deserves to be called leaden. Literature does, indeed, both descend from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of language, and also adopt a less classic attitude in its themes and sentiment, but it is not without a life and value of its own. Some of the writers are pagan, some are Christian, but their religious professions are not to be determined by their dates. Apuleius, the African writer, a professional rhetorician and man of letters, who wrote his prose Metamorphoses or Golden Ass in the second century, is, of course, a pagan, and by no means a model one. The work just mentioned, probably based on current folk-tales, is entirely fiction, narrating the story of a man turned by sorcery into an ass, and describing his adventures, scandalous, distressful, or amusing, in the hands of robbers and other low types of a society which, we may trust, was not really so bad as it is here painted. Yet into this otherwise not very edifying work there comesTHE DARK AGES 117 the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, which has been so frequently translated or recast in literature —best of all by William Morris in the Earthly Paradise—and so frequently utilized as the subject of pictorial or plastic art. From the beginning of the third century until the fifth, Christian views find their exponents in Ter- tullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Prudentius, Jerome, and Augustine. To Jerome is due in particular that Latin version of the Bible of which the present Vulgate represents successive partial revisions, to Augustine the City of God, to Ambrose the initiation of the Chri...« less