The Universal Anthology (Volume 32); A Collection of the Best Literature, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern (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: MERLIN AND HIS FATHER: THE OVERTHROW OF HELL. By EDGAR QUINET. (Translated for this work.) [edgar Quinet, republican and mystic, a believer in progress and a lover of the things progress abolishes, ? a common enough combination, but which confused his logic and made much of his writing incoherent dreams, ? was born at Bourg-en-Bresse, France, a little west of Geneva, in 1803. His father was a republican scientist and mathematician who resigned an army post on Napoleon's usurpation; his mother a cultivated unorthodox Protestant. His first publication was characteristic, being on the Wandering Jew. Then, struck by Herder's " Philosophy of History," he learned German in order to translate it, and at once rose to high repute. After a post on a mission to Greece and a work entitled " Modern Greece," he joined the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and wrote for it for some years, including an article on the old French poetic legends he afterwards wove into so many forms. In 1833 appeared his first considerable work, "Ahasverus," a philosophical rhapsody; also two poems, "Napoleon" and " Prometheus," not highly reputed. In 1838 he published a reply to Strauss' "Life of Jesus." In 1830 he was made professor of foreign literature at Lyons; his lectures there were embodied in "The Genius of Religions" in 1842, when also he was called to the College de France in Paris, as professor of Southern Literature. Instead of this he lectured on the Jesuits and Ultramon- tanism, collecting the lectures into volumes in 1843 and 1844; the resultant hostility was so great that in 1846 the government stopped the course. In 1848 he published " The Revolutions of Italy," one of his most noted works; took up arms in the revolution of that year, and after Louis Philippe's fall, was elected Radic...