Italian Romance Writers Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Romance The eighteenth century is generally supposed to have been anti-romantic in literature, through the revolution in taste which is described by Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762): 'Henceforth, the taste of wit and poetry took a new turn, and the Muse who had wandered so long in the world of fiction was now constrained against her will - To stoop with disenchanted wings to truth, as Sir John Denham somewhere expresses her present enforced state, not unhappily. What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling.' It could not be put better than this, the difference between the two ages - Spenser and Pope. It is an historical judgement that really describes a real difference, and the judgement is all the more significant because it is uttered by a man who is living in the middle of what he describes, who belongs as an eighteenth-century literary man to a world of good sense - a world which is thus conscious of itself, and able to describe itself. What Hurd says in the lifetime of Dr. Johnson could not be improved by any one writing in a later age with all the opportunities for comparison and revision of judgement that are afforded by later revolutions in taste. Hurd is one of the chief advocates of the Faerie Queene in the eighteenth century; one of those who were not quite satisfied with good sense. His Letters on Chivalry and Romance are a protest against the restriction of poetry, a claim for freedom, a justification of the things which were popularly condemned as Gothic and fanciful. His protest throughout is delightfully written, and full of good sayings and good temper. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.