Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon. The work has been praised by critics including the poet and "Beowulf" translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the
The Old English Baron The Old English Baron The Old English Baron is an early Gothic novel by the English author Clara Reeve. It was first published under this title in 1778, although it had anonymously appeared in 1777 under its original name of "The Champion of Virtue", before Samuel Richardson's daughter, Mrs Bridgen, had edited it for her. Apart from typographical errors, the revision was trifling. Miss Reeve noted in the 1778 preface that "This Story is the literary offspring of "The Castle of Otranto", written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the