Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY ON THE AGE FAVOURABLE TO WORKS OF FICTION'. (spring 1826.) / a rude or refined age more favourable to the production of works of fiction f Non etenim credo quia sit divinitus illis Ingenium, aut rerum fato prudentia major. The pleasure we derive from works of fiction is not a measure of their excellence as fictions, farther than as it is perceptible on the first reading. According to this test, refined ages excel in this species of composition. This conclusion is not contradictory to the received opinion, that the poems which have been handed down from wild times, are superior to any thing which has been produced in refined times. For Poetry and Fiction are not, as has been supposed by critics, coextensive ideas. In accounting for the decline of the former, and the improvement of the latter, it is unnecessaiy to suppose that refinement has a tendency to develop the faculties of invention, and repress 1 [Considering the date and matter of this Essay, it has been thought best to place it here, instead of reserving it for the next volume.] VOL. I. L the enthusiasm of poetry. This proceeds on the fallacious notion that the talent which shows itself is the only talent which exists. The real account is this, that the facilities for publication, which alone could make it worth while to take trouble about fiction as such, have a proportionate tendency to keep poetical feeling concealed. In the great works of fiction, to which the preeminence has been so long conceded by the universal consent of mankind, the sources from which we derive pleasure are so various and blended, that it may seem fanciful to attempt any general division of them. They run so much into one another, and depend so much on their combination for their effect, that it is dif...