E-text prepared by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
| Transcriber’s note: | A few typographical errors have been corrected. Theyappear in the text like this, and theexplanation will appear when the mouse pointer is moved over the markedpassage. |
 |
| London, Frederick Warne & Co. |
AMENITIES OF LITERATURE,
CONSISTING OF
SKETCHES AND CHARACTERS OF ENGLISHLITERATURE.
BY
ISAAC DISRAELI.
A New Edition,
EDITED BY HIS SON,
THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.
LONDON:
FREDERICK WARNE AND CO.,
BEDFORD STREET, STRAND.
LONDON:
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
PREFACE.
A history of our vernacular literature has occupied mystudies for many years. It was my design not to furnishan arid narrative of books or of authors, but following thesteps of the human mind through the wide track of Time,to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress, andthe decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as theobjects presented themselves, the great incidents in ournational annals.
In the progress of these researches many topics presentedthemselves, some of which, from their novelty andcuriosity, courted investigation. Literary history, in thisenlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological historyof critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy ofbooks where their subjects, their tendency, and their immediateor gradual influence over the people discover theiractual condition.
Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion;the great form an epoch, the many reflect their age.With them the transient becomes permanent, the suppressedlies open, and they are the truest representativesof their nation for those very passions with which theyare themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writertransmits to us the public and the domestic story, andthus books become the intellectual history of a people.As authors are scattered through all the ranks of society,among the governors and the governed, and the objects oftheir pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiaridiosyncrasy, we are deeply interested in the secret connexionof the incidents of their lives with their intellectualhabits. In the development of that predisposition whichis ever working in characters of native force, all theirfelicities and their failures, and the fortunes which suchmen have shaped for themselves, and often for the world,we discover what is not found in biographical dictionarie