It argues a certain hardness, or at any rate dislike of the "Iliad" on the part of the writer of the "Odyssey," that she should have adopted Hector's farewell to Andromache here, as elsewhere in the poem, for a scene of such inferior pathos.
{12} The reader will note the extreme care which the writer takes to make it clear that none of the suitors were allowed to sleep in Ulysses' house.
A busy age will hardly educate its
writers in correctness.
Our modern authors of comedy have fallen almost universally into the error here hinted at; their heroes generally are notorious rogues, and their heroines abandoned jades, during the first four acts; but in the fifth, the former become very worthy gentlemen, and the latter women of virtue and discretion: nor is the writer often so kind as to give himself the least trouble to reconcile or account for this monstrous change and incongruity.
Within these few restrictions, I think, every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he thus keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprize the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's book.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the first of the rather prominent group of recent Scotch writers of fiction, is as different as possible from Hardy.
The name which naturally closes the list of Victorian writers is that of Rudyard Kipling, though he belongs, perhaps, as much to the twentieth century as to the one preceding.
The
writer has given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair.
Walter Map, like so many of the
writers of this early time, was a priest.
Indeed, a love for any one of these significant
writers will be enough, not to speak of an admiration for "Aucassin and Nicolete."
Early and late I was at it--writing, typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all the forms of writing, and studying the
writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded.
But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became
writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art.
"In the meantime original work of a high order was being produced both in England and America by such
writers as Bradley, Stout, Bertrand Russell, Baldwin, Urban, Montague, and others, and a new interest in foreign works, German, French and Italian, which had either become classical or were attracting public attention, had developed.