This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PROSE. Although it is usual for the sake of convenience to classify great writers according to the century in which they flourished, the division must always be an arbitrary one, since the beginning and ending of a century does not necessarily coincide with the beginning and ending of other things. It does, however, so happen that the authors selected for this volume, with one exception,1 all lived and worked and died within the seventeenth century. Before the seventeenth century English Literature has little to show of what is by common consent regarded as literary prose in the modern sense of the term, that is, prose which follows the approved rules, so far as there can be any, of style. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Hooker, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, to mention only the chief names, wrote literary prose before that era, and their work forms important steps in the evolution of English prose. But the old superstition, if we may so call it, that prose could only be properly written in Latin still lingered. Sir Thomas More's chief book, The Utopia, was written in Latin, so 1 Izaak Walton, born 1593. were Bacon's most important philosophical works, and although he introduced a new prose form--the Essay--into English literature, and practised it in English, he had the final edition of his Essays1 turned into Latin, "for," he said, "I do conceive that the Latin volume of them (being in the universal language) may last as long as books last." Indeed, we may fairly say that before the seventeenth century the only great prose, prose that was at once stately and graceful, and that displayed the capacities of the English language of its time, was that of Hoo...