THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

VOLUME I

FROM THE BEGINNINGS

TO THE

CYCLES OF ROMANCE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,

C. F. CLAY, MANAGER.

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Copyrighted in America

THE

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

EDITED BY

A. W. WARD, LITT.D., F.B.A., Master of Peterhouse

Cambridge:

PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

IN

PREFACE

the preliminary statement of the aims and objects of this History, communicated to those who were invited to become contributors to it, the editors emphasised the following purposes of their undertaking.

(a) A connected account was to be given of the successive movements of English literature, both main and subsidiary; and this was intended to imply an adequate treatment of secondary writers, instead of their being overshadowed by a few great names.

(b) Note was to be taken of the influence of foreign literatures upon English and (though in a less degree) of that of English upon foreign literatures.

(c) Each chapter of the work was to be furnished with a sufficient bibliography.

Very few words seem needed here, in addition to the above, by way of preface to the first volume of the History; this volume and its successors must show how far editors and contributors have been able to carry out in practice the principles by which they have been guided. It may, however, be expedient, while directing attention to a few details in the general plan of the work, to dwell rather more fully on one or two of the ideas which will be kept in view throughout its course.

In an enquiry embracing the history of motives, causes and ends, it is often far less important to dwell on "leading" personalities and on the main tendencies of literary production, than to consider subsidiary movements and writers below the highest rank, and to trace, in apparently arid periods, processes which were often carried on, as it were, underground, or seemed to be such as could safely be ignored. It cannot be too often urged that there are few, if any, isolated phenomena; the voices may be voices crying in the wilderness, but they belong to those who prepare the