Excerpt from The Popular Ballad
The extent of English Literature is now so vast that a comprehensive and scholarly treatment of it as a whole has almost ceased to be regarded as a task within the scope of a single writer. Collaboration has, accordingly, been resorted to more and more; and the method of collaboration hitherto employed has been to assign to each of a group of scholars a chronological period. This is, of course, a natural and useful principle of division. It brings out clearly the relation of the spirit of contemporary life to the literature of a period; and the considerations it involves will always be of prime importance. But it has certain serious defects. The separation of periods tends to exaggerate the differences between them, and to obscure the essential continuity of literary history. The Middle Ages, for example, are frequently treated as a static period, and the Renaissance is described as if the tendencies which characterized it began abruptly.
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