Bell's Edition: The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill ...

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J. Bell, 1782 - English poetry

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Page 194 - The matter and manner of their tales and of their telling are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings that each of them would be improper in any other mouth.
Page 193 - Tis true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine...
Page 194 - Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity, their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling and their breeding — such as are becoming of them and of them only.
Page 193 - He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his " Canterbury Tales" the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his age.
Page 193 - We can only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace...
Page 188 - And who had Canace to wife, That own'd the vertuous Ring and Glass, And of the wondrous Hors of Brass, On which the Tartar King did ride...
Page 188 - The Truth is, it has been hitherto a little too carelessly handled, and, I think, has had less labor spent about its 1 5 polishing then it deserves. Till the time of King Henry the Eighth, there was scarce any man regarded it but Chaucer, and nothing was written in it which one would be willing to read twice but some of his Poetry, But then it began to raise it self a little, and to sound tolerably well.
Page 192 - In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer or the Romans Virgil...
Page 17 - Saxon original, is an abbreviation of AF, or OF; of AT ; of ON, or IN; and often only a corruption of the prepositive particle GE, or Y.
Page 177 - God then to blind the eyes of them, " for the more commodity of his people, to the intent " that through the reading of his treatises, some fruit " might redound thereof to his church, as no doubt it " did to many. As also I am partly informed of cer...

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