Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1
All the texts, with the exception of those in the appendices, have been transcribed from the originals, without any alterations beyond the correction of ob vions misprints and the revision of the punctuation in the direction of clarity and order but a few editorial emendations have been admitted, and duly pointed out in the notes. My own interests as a scholar happen to lie chie?y in the syntheses of literary history, rather than in the textual or philological studies which are its servants. But an unfaithful servant may play havoc with any household, and here, as drudge no less than as master, I have attempted to give that scrupulous adequacy of text which must be the basis of all the higher researches and speculations of literary scholar ship. My aim has been to include complete texts only but in a few instances, such as in the case of treatises too large and not sufficiently significant to include as wholes, and especially in the case of important loci in works not wholly critical in their nature, I have been obliged to restrict myself to chapters, sections, or pas sages complete in themselves. It is obvious that the trend of criticism is often greatly influenced by books of this latter sort, and the dicta they contain often form part and parcel of its history. The somewhat more fragmentary character of the texts in the first volume is not accidental or arbitrary; it is highly significan't'initself, and is conditioned by the spirit and the methods of Jacobean and early Caroline criticism. On the other hand, the selection of the texts must be determined to some extent by my own conception of the critical development of the century, and this I have given in summary fashion in the general Introduction. The admirable work of Dr. Hamelius, Signor Benedetto Croce, Professor Saintsbury, Pro fessors Gayley and Scott, M. Bourgoin, M. Brunetiere, and others, has by no means exhausted the fruitful field of seventeenth-century criticism. In the notes I have tried, by rigid compression and the exclusion, so far as possible, of philological and antiquarian detail, to give such information only as will be of service to the student of the history of criticism but in such things, only 'marginal stuffings' and not 'unlearned drudgery'1 can be avoided. The third volume will contain an index.
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