Project Gutenberg's Hazlitt on English Literature, by Jacob Zeitlin

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Title: Hazlitt on English Literature
An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature

Author: Jacob Zeitlin

Release Date: January 31, 2010 [EBook #31132]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HAZLITT ON
ENGLISH LITERATURE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

BY
JACOB ZEITLIN, PH.D.
ASSOCIATE IN ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH: 35 WEST 32ND STREET

LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD

1913
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_

_Copyright, 1913_

BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

AMERICAN BRANCH

PREFACE

The present selection of Hazlitt's critical essays has been planned to
serve two important purposes. In the first place it provides the materials
for an estimate of the character and scope of Hazlitt's contributions to
criticism and so acquaints students with one of the greatest of English
critics. And in the second place, what is perhaps more important, such a
selection, embodying a series of appreciations of the great English
writers, should prove helpful in the college teaching of literature. There
is no great critic who by his readableness and comprehensiveness is as
well qualified as Hazlitt to aid in bringing home to students the power
and the beauty of the essential things in literature. There is, in him a
splendid stimulating energy which has not yet been sufficiently utilized.

The contents have been selected and arranged to present a chronological
and almost continuous account of English literature from its beginning in
the age of Elizabeth down to Hazlitt's own day, the period of the romantic
revival. To the more strictly critical essays there have been added a few
which reveal Hazlitt's intimate intercourse with books and also with their
writers, whether he knew them in the flesh or only through the printed