Middle English Romance

Famous quotes containing the words middle, english and/or romance:

    For rhetoric, he could not ope
    His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
    And when he happen’d to break off
    I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough,
    H’ had hard words ready to show why,
    And tell what rules he did it by;
    Samuel Butler (1612–1680)

    This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.
    Paul Fussell (b. 1924)