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WORKS BY PROFESSOR CRAIK.

THE

PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE UNDER DIFFICULTIES. New Edition, with Portraits. 2 vols. post 8vo, 98. cloth.

II.

BACON: HIS WRITINGS AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. New Edition, revised, with Notes. Small 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth.

III.

SPENSER, AND HIS POETRY.

New Edition, revised. Small 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth.

A

COMPENDIOUS HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE,

AND OF

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

FROM

The Norman Conquest.

WITH NUMEROUS SPECIMENS.

BY

GEORGE L. CRAIK, LL.D.,

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

62074-B.

LONDON:

GRIFFIN, BOHN, AND COMPANY,

STATIONERS' HALL COURT.

1861.

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LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

PREFACE.

IN the largest or loosest sense of the expression a History of English Literature might be taken to mean an account of everything that has been written in the language. But neither is the literature of a language everything that has been written in it, nor would all that has been written in the language necessarily comprehend all its literature, for much true literature may exist, and has existed, without having been written. Literature is composed of words, of thought reduced to the form of words; but the words need not be written; it is enough that they be spoken or sung, or even only conceived. All that writing does is to record and preserve them. It no more endows them with any new character than money acquires a new character by being locked up in a desk or paid into a bank.

But, besides this, if the history of a national literature is to have any proper unity, it can rarely embrace the language in its entire extent. If it should attempt to do so, it would be really the history not of one but of several literatures. In some cases it might even be made a question when it was that the language properly began, at what point of the unbroken thread which undoubtedly connects every form of human speech with a succession of preceding forms out of which it has sprung we are to say that an old language has died and a new one come into existence; but, at any rate, even when the language is admitted to be the same, it not unfrequently differs almost

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