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Excerpt from Countries of the Mind: Essays in Literary Criticism

Many of them were written on the occasion of anniversaries. There is something arbitrary, therefore, in grouping them in a single volume; and yet perhaps their association is not really quite so accidental as may at first sight appear. The year 1821, in which Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Amiel were born, was obviously a crucial moment in the spiritual history of the nineteenth century; and these four men, animated by a similar spirit of disillusion, are best understood in relation to one another. Dostoevsky, it is true, is treated only incidentally in this volume: but I may be allowed to refer the reader to my earlier book, Fyodor Dostoevsky A Critical Study.

The two essays on Shakespeare, the one as general as the other is particular, deal with What is essentially the same subject; while the two essays on Clare and Collins are complementary, as exhibiting two directly contrasted types of poetic sensibility.

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