Publisher's Synopsis
This volume of Leslie Stephen's essays on literary criticism features his articles on writers of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Stephen finds much worth in the plays of the Jacobean playwright Philip Massinger as well as in the dense prose work of Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy) and Sir Thomas Browne, full of curious and obscure learning. Thomas Fuller, a biographer and religious thinker, also comes in for analysis. Other writers of religious and philosophical work-William Law, an Anglican clergyman; Lord Shaftesbury, a Deist thinker; and Bernard Mandeville, author of the outrageous satire The Fable of the Bees-are also discussed in detail. Stephen finds great historical interest in the State Trials of the late 17th century, especially those focusing on the notorious Judge Jeffreys. But Stephen devotes the greatest attention to the early novelists Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, whose work he studies with profundity and sympathy.
