Publisher's Synopsis
From the introductory.
In dealing particularly with any period of literary history it is, I think, in the first place, desirable to consider, at least in its broader outlines, that which preceded it; as we are thus better enabled to estimate not only the developmental influences which have evolved its production, but also the causes of which such development is the result. In briefly considering therefore the Lake Poets and their influence on English poetry, I shall glance backward for a moment to the so-called Classical School which the Lake Poets superseded, and against which the latter so vigorously protested.
The germs of Classicism in our literature may be said to have been introduced during the glorious Elizabethan era, during which the discovery of printing, and the consequent diffusion of the Greek and Roman classics, and the works of Italian and French writers, by means of translations, not only excited a general taste for elegant reading, but exerted the genial influences of literature upon a class of readers who had never previously been subject to them. England, however, was late in cultivating classical learning, as English literature was slower still in yielding to classical influences. The great stream of Elizabethan literature gushed forth from a native source, and with such power that it resisted the influence of the classics even after they had begun to be studied in England.
