The English Novel

The English novel from Lyly and Nash to the end of the nineteenth century, in one volume, by a man who appears to have read all of it. Saintsbury was professor at Edinburgh and wrote histories of criticism, of prosody, and of wine; his judgements are brisk, personal and occasionally outrageous, and he is never dull about a book he dislikes. A survey from the last generation of critics who could still hold the whole subject in one head. Sixty plates of Hogarth and Whistler and their fellows trace the same English life the novel drew on, from Garrick on the stage to Chelsea by night.