scholarship. Fancy, too, of a suddener and wittier sort, preserves
some of the ample labours of Thomas Fuller, which are
scattered over the years 1631–1662; and the Lives and Compleat
Angler (1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or pious pieces
of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred
learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast
erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical
(Britannia, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and
chronological learning, one of the many savants of the Anglican
church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer
style than Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against
the multiplying of “vitals in religion”; the chief were Chillingworth,
one of the closest of English apologists, in his Religion of
Protestants (1638), and John Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or
rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who form a curious digression in
the history of modern philosophy, produced two writers, John
Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric prose, more
directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and their
champion of erudition, Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System,
gave some form to their doctrine.
Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the historian’s material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, printed in 1702–1704, thirty years after his death. Historical writing hitherto, but for Bacon’s Henry VII., had been tentative though Clarendon. profuse. Raleigh’s vast disquisition upon all things, The History of the World (1614), survives by passages and poetic splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles’s History of the Turks, and the rhetorical History of the Long Parliament by May, had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon’s book, one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries, spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon’s Life, above all the picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence, unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton’s Milton’s prose. polemic prose, hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print in Areopagitica (1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive energies that were to be transformed into Paradise Lost and Samson. His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible; he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.
A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with Tyndale’s, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations. More scholarly than all the preceding versions which it utilized, it won its incomparable The Authorized Version. form, not so much because of the “grand style that was in the air,” which would have been the worst of models, as because the style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the greatest translation—being of a whole literature, or rather of two literatures—in an age of great translations.
Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose. The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English hands, failing a La Bruyère—in Hall’s, in Overbury’s, even in those of the gay and skilful Earle (Microcosmographie, 1628)—the Character is a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensée, or detached remark, practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the popular Resolves of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more modern form, though Howell’s English is in the plainer and quicker movement.
IV. Restoration Period
Literature from 1660 to 1700.—The Renaissance of letters in England entered on a fresh and peculiar phase in the third quarter of the century. The balance of intellectual and artistic power in Europe had completely shifted since 1580. Inspiration had died down in Italy, and its older classics were no longer a stimulus. The Spanish drama had flourished, but its influence though real was scattered and indirect. The Germanic countries were slowly emerging into literature; England they scarcely touched. But the literary empire of France began to declare itself both in Northern and Southern lands, and within half a century was assured. Under this empire the English genius partly fell, though it soon asserted its own equality, and by 1720 had so reacted upon France as more than to repay the debt. Thus between 1660 and 1700 is prepared a temporary dual control French influence. of European letters. But in the age of Dryden France gave England more than it received; it gave more than it had ever given since the age of Chaucer. During Charles II.’s days Racine, Molière, La Fontaine and Bossuet ran the best of their course. Cavalier exiles like Waller, Cowley and Hobbes had come back from the winter of their discontent in Paris, and Saint-Evremond, the typical bel esprit and critic, settled long in England. A vast body of translations from the French is recounted, including latterly the works of the Protestant refugees printed in the free Low Countries or in England. Naturally this influence told most strongly on the social forms of verse and prose—upon comedy and satire, upon criticism and maxim and epigram, while it also affected theology and thought. And this meant the Renaissance once more, still unexhausted, only working less immediately and in fresh if narrower channels. Greek literature, Plato and Homer and the dramatists, became dimmer; the secondary forms of Latin poetry came to the fore, especially those of Juvenal and the satirists, and the pedestris sermo, epistolary and critical, of Horace. These had some direct influence, as Dryden’s translation of them, accompanying his Virgil and Lucretius, may show. But they came commended by Boileau, their chief modernizer, and in their train was the fashion of gallant, epigrammatic and social verse. The tragedy of Corneille and Racine, developed originally from the Senecan drama, contended with the traditions of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and was reinforced by that of the correcter Jonson, in shaping the new theatre of England. The French codifiers, who were often also the distorters, of Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poëtica, furnished a canonical body of criticism on the epic and the drama, to which Dryden is half a disciple and half a rebel. All this implied at once a loss of the larger and fuller inspirations of poetry, a decadence in its great and primary forms, epic, lyric and tragic, and a disposition, in default of such creative power, to turn and take stock of past production. In England, therefore, it is the age of secondary verse and of nascent, often searching criticism.
The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science
and speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not
encouraged. The activities of the newly-founded
Royal Society told directly upon literature, and
counted powerfully in the organization of a clear,
Science
and
Letters.
uniform prose—the “close, naked, natural way of
speaking,” which the historian of the Society, Sprat, cites as
