Shaw's New History of English Literature; Together with a History of English Literature in America (Paperback)

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: CHAPTHH WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I loved the man and do honor to his memory, on this Bide idolatry, as much as tnj. He was indeed honest aud of an open and free nature."?Ben Jonson. " Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child."?HUton. " But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be, Within that circle none durst walk but he."? Dryden. " I hold a perfect comedy to be the perfection of human composition; and I irmly believe that fifty Iliads and Aeneids could be written sooner than such i character as FalstafTs."?Horace Waljmle. " 1 am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority Of Shakespeare over all other writers."?S. W. Emerson. " I cannot account for Shakespeare's low estimate of his own writings, except From the sublimity, the super-humanity of his genius."?Wordswwtli. " Shakespeare is of no age. lie speaks a language which thrills in our blood in. Bpitc of the separation of two hundred yeare. His thoughts, passions, feelings, strains of fancy, all are of this day as they were of his own; and his genius may be contemporary with the mind of every generation for a thousand years to come."? Prof. Wilson. " More full of wisdom and ridicule ami sagacity than all the" moralists and satirists that ever existed, Shakespeare is more mild, airy and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the orld, tiid lias all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his liigh faculties o temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason, nor the most sensitive, for defect of nrnameut or ingenuity." '-Lord.Jt.ffmj. " The name of Shakespeare is the greatest in our literature?it is the greatest in all literature. "No man ever came near hint in the...