The Augustan Ages (Barnes & Noble Digital Library‪)‬

Starting in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Europe enjoyed a literary flowering—a rebirth of interest in classical values and rational principles of discourse, exemplified in French and British prose, verse, and drama. This 1899 overview of that literary landscape (and touching on the writings of other European countries as well) brought its author a reputation as “a scholar on the heroic scale of learning.”