Yet, if it excoriated the bland assumptions of a Sir Walter Raleigh on one level, it was also in complicity with them on another
the touchstone of literature, which was less an academic subject than a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself
it was possible to smear classical philology as a form of ponderous Teutonic nonsense
due to Germanic influence; this helped pave the way for the rise of English
English was a upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology; since every English gentleman read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of submitting it to systematic study
his rhetorical claim to be 'representative' of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities
