The Lion of Flanders, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book The Lion of Flanders, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) written by Hendrik Conscience and published by . This book was released on 2016-07-17 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Lion of Flanders, Vol. 1 Conscience could not go so far as this, of course, for a very good reason: Had he written in Dutch, he would simply have become a Dutch author, without the least in uence over the corrupted dialect he wished to raise to a place of honor. Therefore he wrote in Flemish, but with the awakening touch of a true genius. The lan guage grew under his master pen; he drew from it humor and pathos, descriptive range and ight of eloquence, yet he never forced it to service beyond its power. Instead, he discovered, by patient search and study, the needed word, the desired turn of phrase, the happy idiom, long forgotten, or long condemned to the most menial of prosaic uses. His style is clear and exible, intimate without being familiar, and of an admirable simplicity. His search for the buried treasures of word and phrase in the archives of old Flanders served a second purpose: it yielded him the material for his historical novels. It is beyond doubt that in this field Conscience took his cue from Scott, like the rest of the romancers of that day. It was a period of which historical fiction was. One of the logical products. The downfall of Napoleon had been followed by a revival of patriotism, still more by a desire to forget recent national humiliations in the glory of earlier national triumphs. Conscience drew with that gifted pen of his the glories of medieval Belgium; so that, while his Flemings were reveling in their ancestors' noble deeds as told by him, they discovered at the same time with wondering delight the dignity of their olden speech and its resources. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."