Literature And Composition Carol Jago Pdf Download
Theodora Glime
Janel Bolender, 7th grade literature/composition teacher, McLean County District 5, Normal, IL and Trisha Warner, secondary literacy coach, McLean County District 5, Normal, IL
This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnishedthe studious with honours and avocations; but theywere reserved only for themselves: it withdrew them fromthe cultivation of all vernacular literature. They courtednot the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignifiedsecretaryship offered the only profit or honour theliterary man contemplated. Accustomed to the finishedcompositions of the ancients, the scholar turned away fromthe rudeness of the maternal language. There was noother public opinion than what was gathered from thewritings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read;they transcribed as sacred what authority had long established;their arguments were scholastic and metaphysical,for they held little other communication with the100world, or among themselves, but through the restrictedmedium of their writings. This state was a heritage ofideas and of opinions, transmitted from age to age withlittle addition or diminution. Authority and quotationclosed all argument, and filled vast volumes. Universityresponded to university, and men of genius were followingeach other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to solate a period as the days of Erasmus, every Latin wordwas culled with a classical superstition; and a week ofagony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid with amosaic of phrases.5 While this verbal generation flourished,some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes ofCicero, and, in a cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil.All native vigour died away in the coldness of imitation;and a similarity of thinking and of style deprived thewriters of that raciness which the nations of Europesubsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacularliterature.