On English Prose

The varying patterns in the development of English prose from the discursiveness of the fourteenth century to the directness of the twentieth are outlined in this book, which comprises the Alexander Lectures for 1956-57. As he traces the course of English prose history, the author quotes, for example and analysis, from Sidney, Lyly, Bacon, Hooker, Bunyan, Hobbes, Dryden, Meredith, James, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and others.