The literary history as I conceive it is an account of one strand so to speak in a very complex tissue: it is connected with the intellectual and social development; it represents movements of thought which may sometimes check and be sometimes propitious to the existing forms of art; it is the utterance of a class which may represent or fail to represent the main national movement; it is affected more or less directly by all manner of religious political social and economical changes; and it is dependent upon the occurrence of individual genius for which we cannot even profess to account. I propose to take the history of English literature in the eighteenth century. I do not aim at originality: I take for granted the ordinary critical judgments upon the great writers of whom so much has been said by judges certainly more competent than myself and shall recall the same facts both of ordinary history and of the history of thought. What I hope is that by bringing familiar facts together I may be able to bring out the nature of the connection between them; and little as I can say that will be at all new to illustrate one point of view which as I believe it is desirable that literary histories should take into account more distinctly than they have generally done.