Bøker av Goldwin Smith

This book is supremely important in Canadian nationalist thought because the author asked the question which all Canadian nationalists have since tried to answer: what positive value does the country embody and represent that justifies her existence?

This biography of William Cowper by Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1880 (this reissue being from the 'ninth thousand' of 1881). Smith states in his opening chapter that Cowper (1731-1800) 'is the most important English poet of the period between Pope and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley ... he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the Revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all'. He also regards Cowper as the great poet of the religious revival of the eighteenth century. Smith himself was an Oxford-educated historian who wrote for the Saturday Review among other periodicals. He was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1858, and later taught at Cornell University, before settling in Canada, where he wrote widely on historical, constitutional and religious topics.

Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a British historian and journalist considered by contemporaries a leading proponent of left-wing intellectual radicalism. This volume, first published in 1863, contains a collection of letters written by Smith examining British colonial interests, including government and possible self-determination, from an anti-imperialist standpoint.