Thomas Lounsbury

"The , the s, the , the , and the have met or succeeded one another upon British soil; and the occupation of the country by each has left ineffaceable records of itself in the tongue we use to-day. But English was to the original speech of the island. In the modern form in which we know it, it can, indeed, hardly lay claim to a higher age than five hundred years."

"It was in the that the forces which give stability and credit to a language began first to operate powerfully upon the speech employed by the great body of the people. It was in the latter half of that century that , in the strict sense of the word literature, properly begins. Numerous works had, indeed, been written between the and this period; but, with the exception of some few specimens of lyric poetry, there had been nothing produces, which, looked at from a purely literary point of view, had any reason to show for its existence. If known to the cultivated classes at all, it was probably treated with contempt; for it was certainly contemptible in execution, whatever it may have been in design. The men who, during those centuries, wrote in English, seem to have done so in most cases because they had not the knowledge or the ability to write in Latin or in French. To a very large extent, their works were translations."

"It was the attacks connected with the controversy about the "Naval History" that more than anything else embittered ’s feelings. He had striven hard to write a full and trustworthy account of the achievements of his country upon the sea. Because he had refused to pervert what he deemed the truth to the gratification of private spite, he had been assailed with a malignity that had hardly stopped short of any species of misrepresentation. Rarely has devotion to the right met with a worse return. The reward of untiring industry, of patriotic zeal, and of conscientious examination of evidence, was little else than calumny and abuse. He felt so keenly the treatment he had received that he regretted having ever written the "Naval History" at all."

"The appreciation which gladly recognized Chaucer as standing at the head of all living English poets never, to our knowledge, inspired a solitary disciple to place upon record the slightest particular in the story of his career. His superiority remained unchallenged during the century that followed his death. Yet no account of him on even the most insignificant scale was even attempted till after he had been in his grave almost a hundred and fifty years. Nothing could show more pointedly how alien was the spirit of the past to that of the present."

"}} in the course of time became the literary autocrat of his age. He was disliked by many; but there was no one to dispute his supremacy. As he was conspicuously identified with the of the , it was inevitable that his advocacy of it and his example should affect in some measure the belief and practice of his contemporaries."

"By Shakespeare Voltaire was both attracted and repelled. As a Frenchman, trained in the strictest rules of the s, and disposed to render those rules even more rigid, he was shocked beyond measure by the irregularities, the gross improprieties, or rather indecencies, as he looked upon them, in which the greatest English dramatist had indulged with no apparent consciousness that his course was anything but perfectly proper. A man who could in all sincerity assert, as did Voltaire, that in the , all other laws, that is to say, all other beauties of the drama, are comprised, was not likely to be impressed favorably by the persistent disregard of them which Shakespeare had manifested. He shuddered furthermore at the mixture of the comic and the tragic in the same production; at the low characters which were brought upon the stage, and the low language in which they indulged; at the scenes of violence, of horror, and of carnage which were enacted in full view of the audience. Such practices ran counter to all his personal tastes and prejudices, as well as to the traditions of which he believed, or tried to believe, surpassed not only that of all modern nations, but themselves."

"The pronouncing dictionary has not only come, but is treated with a deference to which, at the outset, it was an utter stranger. It seems as if its production must have been due in the first instance to the desire for a work of such a nature manifested by the imperfectly educated middle class, rising more and more into social prominence. The members of this body wanted somebody to tell them precisely what to say and how to say it. They did not care to exercise the right of private judgment, or, rather, they did not have sufficient faith in their own cultivation to trust it. Authority was what they were after; and when men are longing for authority on any subject, some one will be considerate enough of their welfare, and confident enough in his own sufficiency, to come forward and furnish it."

"W is to be found the best text of ? Of the many s before the public, which one is the one to be preferred? These are questions which are pretty certain to be asked by him who is about to take up for the first time the study of that author's dramatic productions. It may and it sometimes does cause a feeling of disappointment when the answer is made—as no other answer can fairly be made—that not only is there no best edition of Shakespeare's works, but there never can be and never will be one."

"Professor Lounsbury's name, I suppose, is most closely associated by the public with his studies in Chaucer and Shakespeare. His literary taste, however, was singularly catholic. Pope and Dryden, for example, appealed to him strongly because of their pugnacity and the keenness of their satire. Their poems he knew intimately, and he often quoted passages from them in conversation, not always accurately but rather by way of a paraphrase which gave new edge to an epigram. Of later poets the ones he read most were Byron, Browning, and Tennyson. From any one of the three, he would repeat, when in the mood for it, long stretches running to hundreds of verses."