Excerpt from The English and American Poets and Dramatists of the Victorian Age: With Biographical Notices For some years past the conviction has been gradually gaining ground in Germany, that a knowledge of the English language, as well as of the England and the Englishman of our times, is only to be acquired by a study of the popular literature of the present day. Germans who have visited England relying on their acquaintance with the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have found themselves in a world where everything was strange to them. They daily heard a language in many respects unlike that of the authors with whom they were familiar: they misunderstood the greater part of what was said to them, were misunderstood in their turn, and saw themselves at last necessitated to apply themselves seriously to the acquisition of a tongue, of which they had imagined themselves to be perfect masters. From this it by no means follows, that a study of the older English writers is valueless, for the man who can trace the language back to its sources possesses an immense advantage, other circumstances being equal, over the less deeply read student. 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.