An Anthology of English Prose

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Excerpt from An Anthology of English Prose: 1332 to 1740 From the Greek Anthology, that great bouquet of imperishable flowers, to our own Golden Treasury, and Oxford Book of Verse, the making of such selections of poetry has been the work of excellent critics. These Anthologies, as the makers of this selection of prose passages quote Sir Philip Sidney, "As if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of grapes, that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further". They who have tasted the honey of ancient rhyme in a good Anthology, may desire to walk for themselves in the gardens of the past, and to gather more of the unfading blossoms with their own hands, and at the bidding of their own taste. The selector and collector of fine passages of prose has a more difficult task. Our earliest English lyrics, even before Chaucer's time, have a charm of melody, an artless note as of the birds in spring, which survives in the best modern poetry, and at once seems familiar and alluring to the least experienced reader. But old prose is more strange, more difficult, and therefore, to most readers, is much less alluring. Again, lyrics are things complete in themselves, whereas it is by no means easy to find brief and charming passages of early prose, perfect within themselves, apart from their contexts. Such a passage, in this volume, is Sidney's "Journey to Arcadia" (pp. 57, 58), where the unaccustomed reader is apt to be surprised by the inordinate length of the first sentence. 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.