Chautauqua Reading Circle Literature

FROM

CHAUCER TO TENNYSON

WITH TWENTY-NINE PORTRAITS

AND

SELECTIONS FROM THIRTY AUTHORS.

BY

HENRY A. BEERS

_Professor of English Literature in Yale University_.


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PREFACE.

In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get
room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is impossible--but
any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out
every thing but _belles lettres_. Books in philosophy, history, science,
etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the
merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have
omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a