Age of Dryden (1660–1700)

REVIEWS

“This scholarly little volume from the learned pen of Dr. Garnett is one of a series of ‘Handbooks to English Literature,’ edited by Professor Hales. . . . Within the limits of his space Dr. Garnett surveys the several departments of literature in this period with singular comprehensiveness, broad sympathy, and fine critical sagacity. . . . We have no great love for handbooks of literature, but perhaps they are a necessity of an age of examinations and university extensions. If so, it is as well that the task of writing them should be entrusted to such competent hands and judicious pens as those of Dr. Garnett.”—Times.

“The series which Professor Hales is editing, and of which this is the second volume, aims at being that very difficult and important” something between the text-book for schools and the gracefully allusive literary essay. Dr. Garnett has done his part of the work admirably. Most readable is his book, written with a fine sense of proportion, and containing many independent judgments, yet even, so far as minor names and dates and acts are concerned, complete enough for all save a searcher after minutiae.”—Bookman.

“Dr. Garnett has succeeded in presenting its more notable characteristics, while mapping out a course of study for those who are bent on making themselves acquainted with those writers at first hand .”—Daily News

“Though planned on the scale of the manual, this book is actually the first attempt worth naming to grasp in one separate review the literature if the last forty years of the seventeenth century, a time which, as Dr. Garnett well says, ‘with all its defects, had a faculty for producing masterpieces.’ Dr. Garnett’s name is a warrant for his acquaintance not only with the masterpieces but with much besides, and with more than all that need be named in the kind of survey he undertakes.”—Manchester Guardian.

“It is an ably written and interesting sketch of the literary history of its period, which reviews the literature of the time so as to make the academic tradition of the subject so interesting that readers of the book will be stimulated to read in the originals for themselves.”—Scotsman.