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One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

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George Saintsbury
Age: 87 †
Born: 1845
Born: October 23
Died: 1933
Died: January 28
Literary Critic
University Teacher
Writer
Southampton
Hampshire
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury
History
Fiction
Languages
Facts
Name
Classical
Least
Literary
Two
Names
European
Best
Literature
Prose
Great
Call
Absence
Lateness
Known
Rate
Comparative
Language
Western
Intelligible

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So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.
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Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
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We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
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The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
George Saintsbury
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The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.
George Saintsbury
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The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.
George Saintsbury
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The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.
George Saintsbury
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But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice at the closing of the day. I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.
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Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.
George Saintsbury
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Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
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I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.
George Saintsbury
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Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
George Saintsbury
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But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.
George Saintsbury
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But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
George Saintsbury
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To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.
George Saintsbury
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When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
George Saintsbury
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When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)
George Saintsbury