Excerpt from English Tales in Verse: With an Introduction Literature has hardly evolved an epic style. The lyric and dramatic imagination of the sixteenth century, the curious far-reaching intellect of the seventeenth, the satiric and moralizing reflections of the eighteenth, turned the main currents of verse style aside from the simple ends of story. Spenser drove it in large undulating eddies along his spa clous stanza; Shakespeare tossed it flashing and foaming hither and thither under the stress Of his passion and his thought; Cowley forced it to take the ply of his curious fancy; and Waller began that process of polarizing it into antithesis and crystallizing it into epigram which reached its consummation under the dexterous touch of Pope. Throughout the eighteenth century, narrative verse, unless quickened by the zest of satire or burlesque, was something of a tour de force; the recounting pen willingly meandered into description, or sub sided into sentiment. Then, in very happy time, came to the rescue 'the other harmony of prose'; a cool, indifferent, flexible material, fitted to take the mental mould of the genial but unromantic observers who created the English novel, and long since freed by Dryden from the traditional rhetoric which might have thwarted and perverted their natural vein. The temper of the modern novel has been preponderatingly the temper of prose; and no verse since Chaucer's could have adequately conveyed the wealth of matter-of-fact observation and robust humour in which its strength has lain. Yet verse was not to perish as a vehicle of story. The nineteenth century recovery of poetry was effected largely through the channel of romance. 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.