Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries  

"Historians and other writers were wont to treat the [ Middle Ages ] as having been without learning or scholarship of any kind. Even Mr. Hallam [in Introduction to the Literature of Europe] [...] could find no good to say of the Church or its institutions, characterizing the early university as the abode of "indigent vagabonds withdrawn from usual labor," and all monks as positive enemies of learning."--Bibliomania in the Middle Ages (1900) by Frederick Somner Merryweather

"But the most celebrated, and certainly the most brilliant performance in the path of fiction, that belongs to this age, is that of Rabelais. Few books are less likely to obtain the praise of a rigorous critic; but few have more the stamp of originality, or show a more redundant fertility, always of language, and sometimes of imagination. He bears a slight resemblance to Lucian, and a considerable one to Aristophanes. His reading is large, but always rendered subservient to ridicule; he is never serious in a single page, and seems to have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out the exuberance of his animal gaiety. In the latter part of Pantagruel’s history, that is, the fourth and fifth books, one published in 1552, the other, after the author’s death, in 1561, a dislike to the church of Rome, which had been slightly perceived in the first volumes, is not at all disguised; but the vein of merriment becomes gradually less fertile, and weariness anticipates the close of a work which had long amused while it disgusted us. Allusions to particular characters are frequent, and, in general, transparent enough with the aid of a little information about contemporaneous history, in several parts of Rabelais; but much of what has been taken for political and religious satire cannot, as far as I perceive, be satisfactorily traced beyond the capricious imagination of the author. Those who have found Montluc, the famous bishop of Valence, in Panurge, or Antony of Bourbon, father of Henry IV., in Pantagruel, keep no measures with chronology. Panurge is so admirably conceived, that we may fairly reckon him original; but the germ of the character is in the gracioso, or clown, of the extemporaneous stage; the roguish, selfish, cowardly, cunning attendant, who became Panurge in the plastic hands of Rabelais, and Sancho in those of Cervantes. The French critics have not in general done justice to Rabelais, whose manner was not that of the age of Louis XIV. The Tale of a Tub appears to me by far the closest imitation of it, and to be conceived altogether in a kindred spirit; but in general those who have had reading enough to rival the copiousness of Rabelais have wanted his invention and humour, or the riotousness of his animal spirits."--Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries (1837) by Henry Hallam

"In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover, required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm, sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the first work of mere invention (for though the characters are historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to commemorate the novel which introduced it."--Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries (1837) by Henry Hallam

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy belongs, by its systematic divisions and its accumulated quotations, to the class of mere erudition; it seems, at first sight, like those tedious Latin folios, into which scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threw the materials of their Adversaria, or common-place books, painfully selected and arranged by the labour of many years. But writing, fortunately, in English, and in a style not by any means devoid of point and terseness, with much good sense and observation of men as well as of books, and having also the skill of choosing his quotations for their rareness, oddity, and amusing character, without losing sight of their pertinence to the subject, he has produced a work of which, as is well known, Johnson said, that it was the only one which had ever caused him to leave his bed earlier than he had intended. Johnson, who seems to have had some turn for the singularities of learning, which fill the Anatomy of Melancholy, may perhaps have raised the credit of Burton higher than his desert. He is clogged by excess of reading, like others of his age, and we may peruse entire chapters without finding more than a few lines that belong to himself. This becomes a wearisome style, and, for myself, I have not found much pleasure in glancing over the Anatomy of Melancholy. It may be added that he has been a collector of stories far more strange than true, from those records of figments, the old medical writers of the sixteenth century, and other equally deceitful sources. Burton lived at Oxford, and his volumes are apparently a great sweeping of miscellaneous literature from the Bodleian library."--Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries (1837) by Henry Hallam