Monologue and attitude revealed through brownings my last duchess essay

Two well-known general publishing houses had declined the book—one because it was too much of a story and not sufficiently a religious book, and the other because it was too much a religious book and not sufficiently a story—and both on the ground that it was not likely to justify the expense of publication. The author had then offered the manuscript to a house that made a specialty of publishing in the religious field. There it was accepted and published. The first printing was one of three thousand copies; the second, one of fifteen hundred.

Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his own, and each has been similarly arraigned.

I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero.

Eugene Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also to thank the Editor of the Manchester Guardian for permitting me to reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs.

Carlyle and the incidents of her death.

Chapter 1 Introductory Summary Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the spirit of four successive generations.

They are leading links in an intellectual chain. DAVID HUME — remains the most salient type in our island of the scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

He had some points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. ROBERT BURNS —last of great lyrists inspired by a local genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge between two eras.

Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or paralysing caution.

Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. THOMAS CARLYLE — is on the whole the strongest, though far from the finest spirit of the age succeeding—an age of criticism threatening to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem.

Even now what Mill twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,—a giant image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn.

Similar is the relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Saturated to the last with the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.

He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous—with one exception, that of Goethe,—to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, violently intolerant.

He bore a strange relation to the great poet, in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord Byron.

One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other was purely Teutonic: The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient name. His career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown.

Two whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, Inkermann, Sadowa,—Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was seventy-five,—have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, revivals and deaths of States innumerable.

During his life our sway in the East doubled its area, two peoples the German with, the Italian without, his sympathy were consolidated on the Continent, while another across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes alarms the rest.

In the internal affairs of the leading nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a pantomime.First and last. Belloc, Hilaire, PRS7 Z6 And to my nephew Albert I leave the island what I won off Fatty Hagan in a poker game Forrest, David.

Aspects of Alice Lewis Carroll's dreamchild as seen through the critics' looking-glasses, Edited by Robert Phillips. The last time I saw the Princess of Wales was within a very few days of my leaving England to visit the United States.

It was in Drury Lane Theatre, then fitted up as an opera house in consequence of the recent burning of Her Majesty's Theatre.

Please begin by reading aloud together the two poems by Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess" and "Porphyria's Lover." The next day, read aloud "Life in a Love," also by Browning, and "Sonnet 43" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert's beloved wife.

My Last Duchess – My Last Duchess is a poem by Robert Browning, frequently anthologised as an example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in in Brownings Dramatic Lyrics, the poem is written in 28 rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

Michael Prum's ‘Earth—Charles Darwin's Last Element’ (CVE 71[] –36) focuses upon Darwin's The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. This was published in October , in other words four months before Darwin's death.

But asceticism he places even above sympathy, since through it is attained the subjection of the will to live and the intellect is freed to pierce the veil of illusion.

Schopenhauer spent the last 30 years of his life in isolation at Frankfurt-am-Main. He gained little acceptance .