A Manual of English Literature - 1879 Author:Henry Morley 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: and form are so rapid, that each needs to be broken up into smaller and subordinate divisions. It is a great help to clearness of apprehension on the part of the... more » student, as well as to fixedness of recollection, if these smaller and subordinate divisions of English literary history can be made to correspond to those simple and natural divisions of English history in general, with which all readers are familiar, namely, divisions into centuries and half-centuries. Accordingly, in this work, beginning with 1350, — at the threshold of our Period of Early Modern English, — we have arranged English writers and their works in groupings of half-centuries, as "The First Half of the Eighteenth Century," " The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," and so forth. The only exception to this practice is in the case of the fifteenth century, of which the entire literary record is so meagre, that it does not need to le divided into halves. Thus the student will be accustomed, from the outset, to associate his knowledge of the literary history of England with his knowledge of its general, social, political, or military history in the same spaces of time, and thereby to see more truly how all these several expressions of the national life of England were swayed at every point by the same influences, how each remains as a witness and a clew to the character of all the others, and how, at last, all need to be studied together, if he would deeply know the history whose meaning he is trying to master. Part I. FIRST ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON: 670-1066. ENGLISH LITERATURE, PERIOD OF FIRST ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON: 67O-1O66. POETS. Ceedmon. Author of Beowulf. Aldhelm. Cynewulf. Authors of Poems in Exeter Book. Authors of Poems in Ver- oelli Book. Authors of Poems in Anglo-...« less