Excerpt from Outlines of English and American Literature: An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived When an author has finished his history, after months or years of happy work, there comes a dismal hour when he must explain its purpose and apologize for its shortcomings. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book, which presents the whole splendid history of English literaturefrom Anglo-Saxon times to the close of the Victorian Era, has threespecific aims. The first is to create or to encourage in every student thedesire to read the best books, and to know literature itself rather thanwhat has been written about literature. The second is to interpretliterature both personally and historically, that is, to show how a greatbook generally reflects not only the author's life and thought but also thespirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim isto show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature hassteadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its presentcomplexity in prose and poetry.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

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.