Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

(5-168498

Undergraduate
-Wheery

PR

448
.c4
567

1923а

COPYRIGHT, 1923

BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U, S, A.

·DER-12-119

[blocks in formation]

THE wholesome tendency of modern scholarship to stop attempting a definition of romanticism and to turn instead to an intimate study of the pre-romantic poets, has led me to publish this volume, on which I have been intermittently engaged for several years. In selecting the approximate dates 1760 and 1800 for the limits, I have been more arbitrary in the later than in the earlier. The year 1760 has been selected because it marks, roughly speaking, the beginning of the Celtic Revival; whereas 1800, the end of the century, is little more than a convenient place for breaking off a history that might have been continued, and may yet be continued, down to the present day.

Even as the volume has been going through the press, I have found many new items from various obscure sources, and I am more than ever impressed with the fact that a collection of this sort can never be complete. I have made an effort, nevertheless, to show in detail what has been hastily sketched in countless histories of literature the nature and extent of the Celtic Revival in the late eighteenth

century.

Most of the material here presented is now published for the first time. The chapter on Gray and Mason, however, is reprinted (with some additions)

by kind permission of the editors of Modern Philology; and many of the essential facts were set forth in my unpublished dissertation at Harvard University in 1913.

I am glad of this opportunity of expressing my thanks to all those friends who have called my attention to various manifestations of the Celtic spirit that might have escaped my observation. My debt of gratitude is especially great to Professor Fred Norris Robinson and Professor Frank Edgar Farley; Professor George Lyman Kittredge and Professor Tom Peete Cross have likewise placed me under a heavy but pleasant obligation. Special courtesies extended in the libraries at Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and the British Museum have greatly facilitated the work of collecting information about minor poets and dramatists; and my researches in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth were made effective through the kindness of John Ballinger, Esq., Librarian, Professor J. H. Davies, and Professor T. Gwynn Jones. Invaluable assistance in reading the proof has been given me by two of my colleagues at Haverford College, Professor John Alexander Kelly and Professor L. Arnold Post.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

1

« VorigeDoorgaan »