The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and tendencies that
have to be understood and appreciated, rather than on facts that have to
be learned by heart. Many authors are not mentioned and others receive
scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach.
The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than with their
lives; consequently it contains few dates. All that the reader need
require to help him have been included in a short chronological table at
the end. To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of
the subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible within
the limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been foreign to the
purpose indicated by the editors of the Home University Library. The
book pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great
subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it
stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the
books of which it treats.