The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Day, Volume 1

Front Cover
Carey and Hart, 1842 - Fiction

From inside the book

Contents

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 92 - Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine; But might I of Jove's nectar sup, I would not change for thine.
Page xix - And as real history gives us not the success of things according to the deserts of vice and virtue, Fiction corrects it, and presents us with the fates and fortunes of persons rewarded or punished according to merit.
Page 202 - Owns the monarch's high command : Thence to Britain shall return (If right prophetic rolls I learn), Borne on Victory's spreading plume, His ancient sceptre to resume ; Once more, in old heroic pride, His barbed courser to bestride ; His knightly table to restore, And brave the tournaments of yore.
Page 344 - Verily, neighbour, in its way, it is the best book in the world : here the knights eat and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills before their deaths ; with several things, which are wanting in all other books of this kind.
Page 373 - Next, (for hear me out now, readers,) that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings and from hence had in renown over all Christendom.
Page 119 - Mahometans affords the groundwork of those fables, which have been so wildly disfigured in the romances of chivalry, and so elegantly adorned by the Italian muse. In the decline of society and art, the deserted cities could supply a slender booty to the Saracens; their richest spoil was found in the churches and monasteries, which they stripped of their ornaments and delivered to the flames: and the tutelar saints, both Hilary...
Page 170 - Volume sont contenus les nobles faictz darmes du vaillant roy Meliadus de Leonnoys: Ensemble plusieurs autres nobles proesses de Chevalerie, faictes...
Page 186 - Levitical law," (Numbers v. 11—31,) continues that accurate writer, " there was prescribed a mode of trial, which consisted in the suspected person drinking water in the tabernacle. The mythological fable of the trial by the Stygian fountain, which disgraced the guilty by the waters rising so as to cover the laurel wreath of the unchaste female who dared the examination, probably 'had its origin in some of the early institutions of Greece or Egypt. Hence the notion was adopted in the Greek romances,...
Page 182 - And ay they grew, and ay they threw, As they wad faine be neare ; And by this ye may ken right weil They were twa luvers deare.
Page 335 - ... when a boy he was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life ; so that (adds his Lordship) spending part of a summer'" at my parsonagehouse in the country, he chose for his regular reading the old Spanish romance of Felixmarte of Hircania, in folio, which he read quite through'.

Bibliographic information