Scottish Men Of Letters In The Eighteenth Century PDF Download

Excerpt from Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century forms a very distinct period of Scottish literary history, for of its men of note not one had begun to write when the century began, and all of them, except Dugald Stewart, had ceased to write when it ended. This volume, however, does not aim so much at giving a history of the literature as at giving an account of the men who made it. Most of the Scots writers had all the characteristics of their country in their speech, their manners, and ways of living, and they preserved their individualities and peculiarities unsuppressed by those social conventions and restraints of fashion which in a later age moulded their countrymen to more ordinary types. It is these personal characteristics, old-fashioned and pronounced, which render them all the more interesting. We are helped very little to a knowledge of them by biographies written by their friends, for these consisted chiefly of brief, colourless memoirs prefixed to their works. Neither can we gain a picture of their times by such diaries and voluminous correspondence as abounded in England, from which we can reconstruct the social life of the age. In Scotland no diaries were written, little correspondence was preserved: the writers themselves did not keep copies for publication, or their friends did not keep the originals for love. 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.