Of Selection by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Also these 18th century men fenced off the whole of our own Middle English and medieval literature -- fenced off Chaucer and Dunbar, Malory and Berners -- as barbarous and "Gothic. " They treated these writers with little more consideration than Boileau had thought it worth while to bestow on Villon or on Ronsard -- enfin Malherbe! As for Anglo-Saxon literature, one may, safely say that, save by Gray and a very few others, its existence was barely surmised.

You may or may not find it harder to forgive them that they ruled out moreover a great part of the literature of the preceding century as offensive to urbane taste, or as they would say, "disgusting. " They disliked it mainly, one suspects, as one age revolts from the fashion of another -- as some of you, for example, revolt from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great writers of that age definitely excluded God from their scheme of things: others included God fiercely, but with circumscription and limitation.