Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

The Rise of Historical Criticism, published in complete form in 1908, is a mature essay by Oscar Wilde, evaluating the history and current state of criticism. The writer goes back in history and tries to remould the art of criticism with allusions to various critics, genres, and periods. Filled with wit and sublimity, the essay is a comprehensive piece of writing that enlightens the ordinary sense through innovative spirit.

AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century - still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poemaffects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible.

John Galsworthy OM (1867-1933) was an English novelist and playwright. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era; challenging in his works some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceeding literature of Victorian England. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. From the Four Winds was Galsworthy's first published work in 1897, a collection of short stories. These, and several subsequent works, were published under the pen name John Sinjohn and it would not be until The Island Pharisees (1904) that he would begin publishing under his own name. His first play, The Silver Box (1906) became a success, and he followed it up with The Man of Property (1906), the first in the Forsyte trilogy. Along with other writers of the time such as Shaw his plays addressed the class system and social issues, two of the best known being Strife (1909) and The Skin Game (1920).