Robert huntington fletcher biography of william hill

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His command of different meters is marvelous; he uses twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him in this respect, and his most characteristic ones are those of gloriously rapid anapestic lines with complicated rime-schemes. The final working over of the poem into its present shape, as has been said, probably took place in England in the seventh or eighth century; in earlier form, perhaps in the original brief ballads, it may have been brought to the country either by the Anglo-Saxons or by stray 'Danes.' It is fundamentally a heathen work, and certain Christian ideas which have been inserted here and there, such as the mention of Cain as the ancestor of Grendel, and the disparagement of heathen gods, merely show that one of the later poets who had it in hand was a Christian.

The genealogical introduction of something over fifty lines (down to the first mention of Hrothgar) has nothing to do with the poem proper; the Beowulf there mentioned is another person than the hero of the poem.

Its medieval form and setting remove it hopelessly beyond the horizon of general readers of the present time, yet it furnishes the most detailed remaining picture of the actual social and economic conditions of its age, and as a great landmark in the progress of moral and social thought it can never lose its significance.

THE WICLIFITE BIBLE.

About his life, as about those of many of our earlier writers, there remains only very fragmentary information, which in his case is largely pieced together from scattering entries of various kinds in such documents as court account books and public records of state matters and of lawsuits. Several of the other novelists of the mid-century and later produced work which in a period of less prolific and less highly developed art would have secured them high distinction.

But as some of them were united into extended groups and as the interest of the congregation deepened, the churches began to seem too small and inconvenient, the excited audiences forgot the proper reverence, and the performances were transferred to the churchyard, and then, when the gravestones proved troublesome, to the market place, the village-green, or any convenient field.

L. S. vol., p. Osgood, Henry Holt and Co., 50 cents.

BURKE. THE ELIZABETHAN LYRIC POEMS. As he appears in the poem, Béowulf is an idealized Anglo-Saxon hero, but in origin he may have been any one of several other different things. As the controversies proceeded, Wiclif was brought at last to formulate the principle, later to be basal in the whole Protestant movement, that the final source of religious authority is not the Church, but the Bible.

u commonly as in push or like oo in spoon, y like i in machine or pin according as it is stressed or not. This distinction should be kept in mind, but in what follows it will not be to our purpose to emphasize it.

GENERAL MATTERS. In the Elizabethan period the holiday revelry continued for twelve days after Christmas; the name of the play means that it is such a one as might be used to complete the festivities.

Mermaid ed. Scott, 1771-1832.
    Byron, 1788-1824. Vol. I has the essays on Clive and Hastings.

CARLYLE'S SARTOR RESARTUS.

He died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in the rather ostentatiously unpretentious way which, with his deep-seated dislike for aristocratic conventions, he had carefully prescribed in his will.

Dickens' popularity, in his own day and since, is due chiefly: (1) to his intense human sympathy; (2) to his unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power; and (3) to his aggressive humanitarian zeal for the reform of all evils and abuses, whether they weigh upon the oppressed classes or upon helpless individuals.

Their bleak country, where the foggy and unhealthy marshes of the coast gave way further inland to vast and somber forests, developed in them during their long inactive winters a sluggish and gloomy mood, in which, however, the alternating spirit of aggressive enterprise was never quenched.