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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



classical definiteness of form, classi- 

 cal finish, and felicity of phrasing. 

 The influence of both is obvious in 

 English poetry to the time of Cow- 

 ley and Dryden. Jonson's and 

 Donne's best disciples are the court- 

 ly lyrists, Thomas Carew, Richard 

 Lovelace, John Suckling, Thomas 

 Stanley, and a host of others down 

 to the earl of Dorset, the earl of 

 Rochester, Charles Sedley, Aphra 

 Behn, and John Dryden himself in 

 the years after the Restoration. 

 The greatest of them, as artist and 

 poet, is Robert Herrick, the great- 

 est Epicurean and fanciful song- 

 writer in our literature. The in- 

 fluence of Donne, his metaphysical 

 wit and his passionate egotism, is 

 most directly traceable in the reli- 

 gious poets, Anglican and Catholic 

 George Herbert, The Temple; 

 Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans; 

 Richard Crashaw, Steps to the 

 Temple, and Carmen Deo Nostro ; 

 in Thomas Traherne, and others. 

 But, together with Donne's in- 

 fluence, that of Italian religious 

 poetry, with its sugared conceits 

 and the mysticism of Spanish 

 writers, as S. Theresa and John of 

 the Cross, can be recognized. 

 The Poetry of Milton 



The greatest of seventeenth cen- 

 tury poets, John Milton, shares the 

 taste of his age for compacted 

 thought and multifarious learning 

 while despising its fantastic and 

 metaphysical conceits. In his 

 poetry, Ben Jonson's ideal of classi- 

 cal form and finish is ministered to 

 by a finer ear and by a poetic tem- 

 perament and imagination as spon- 

 taneously creative as those of the 

 greatest Elizabethans. The early 

 Cambridge and Horton poems, the 

 Nativity Ode, At a Solemn Music, 

 On Time, L' Allegro and II Pen- 

 seroso, Arcades, On the Marchioness 

 of Winchester, Comus, Lycidas, 

 combine the spontaneity, fancy, and 

 ravishing music of Spenser and 

 Shakespeare with a consciously 

 elaborated art, architectonical, 

 stylistic, and metrical, which, on 

 this scale, was a new thing, and has 

 never been surpassed in the history 

 of English poetry. 



Paradise Lost is built from the 

 stern experiences and the rigid 

 political theology of the years of 

 rebellion and pamphleteering. The 

 freshness and charm of the earlier 

 poems are gone, but their loss is 

 compensated for by grandeur of 

 epic creation in incident, character, 

 and setting, and by the most majes- 

 tic and harmoniously modulated 

 blank verse which English ears have 

 ever heard. Paradise Regained is a 

 paler reflex of these qualities, but 

 into Samson Agonistes, Milton's 

 experiment hi classical tragedy, he 

 poured the passion of his own 



sufferings and the defeat of his 

 cause, the pride of his defiant 

 will, clothing them in words and 

 measures as sublime as they are 

 severe. 



But the movement towards 

 classification, definiteness, and per- 

 fection which fulfilled itself so 

 strikingly in Milton followed a line 

 of less resistance in the work of 

 Edmund Waller, John Beaumont, 

 John Denham, William Davenant, 

 and Abraham Cowley. In Cowley's 

 Mistress and Pindarique Odes and 

 Davideis the extravagances of the 

 earlier period are made the more 

 obvious by the subsidence of the 

 imaginative passion which in Donne 

 inspired and condoned for these ; 

 but the common aim of the others, 

 conscious or unconscious, was the 

 rejection of this extravagance, the 

 limitation of the pattern which 

 verse might follow, and the ex- 

 action of a higher degree of correct- 

 ness within that pattern. 



The movement was carried to a 

 triumphant success by John Dry- 

 den, a far inferior poet to Milton, 

 but the first and among the most 

 accomplished of English men of 

 letters dramatist ; poet, eulo- 

 gistic, lyrical, satiric, and didactic ; 

 translator ; literary critic ; and es- 

 sayist. In Dryden's verse and 

 prose the English language is writ- 

 ten as we still use it ; he is our first 

 modern. His satires, as Absalom 

 and Achitophel, and didactics, as 

 Religio Laici, The Hind and the 

 Panther, are an idealised reflection 

 in verse of easy, masculine conver- 

 sation or eloquence. His odes 

 are our supreme examples of lyrics 

 in which there is not a note of song 

 but all is artfully managed noise 

 and declamation. Working within a 

 still more limited pattern, Alexan- 

 der Pope achieved, in the next 

 generation, a yet higher degree of 

 pointed and polished perfection. 



Dryden and Pope 



Nothing can surpass in its own 

 way the eloquence of Eloisa to Abe- 

 lard, the satirical miniature-paint- 

 ing of The Rape of the Lock, the 

 aphorisms and declamations of the 

 Essays on Criticism and Essay on 

 Man," the condensed, polished, poi- 

 sonous satire of the Dunciad, Moral 

 Essays, and Imitations of Horace. 

 Dryden and Pope are the high 

 priests of a school of poets including 

 Prior and Gay among their contem- 

 poraries and a succession of elegant, 

 conventional poets, continued to 

 the end of the century and beyond, 

 whose work may be studied in a 

 collection like Dodsley's. 



The Restoration drama of Eng- 

 land is represented by the high- 

 flown and absurd, but eloquent, 

 heroic plays of Dryden, the path- 



etic, rhetorical tragedies of Nath- 

 aniel Lee and Thomas Otway, the 

 brilliant, polite, licentious comedy 

 of George Etherege, George Far- 

 quhar, William Wycherley, John 

 Vanbrugh, and especially William 

 Congreve. Thereafter, except for 

 brief intervals, as in the plays of 

 Goldsmith and Sheridan and the 

 drama of our own day, the acted 

 drama has not formed an import- 

 ant section of English literature, 

 although almost every poet, Addi- 

 son, Thomson, Gray, Wordsworth, 

 Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, etc., has 

 tried his hand at poetic drama, 

 Elizabethan or classical. 



Development of English Prose 



The same idea of uniformity, of 

 a definite but not too rigid pattern, 

 " correctness," shaped the prose of 

 Dryden, Temple, and their follow- 

 ers. The earlier prose of the 17th 

 century had shared in the irregular 

 greatness of the poetry. The prose 

 of Francis Bacon's Essays, and 

 History of Henry VII ; of the great 

 Anglican preachers, Lancelot An- 

 drewes, John Donne, poet in prose 

 as well as verse, Jeremy Taylor ; 

 of philosophical humorists as 

 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of 

 Melancholy, Thomas Browne, Re- 

 ligio Medici, and Urn Burial ; the 

 controversial pamphlets of Milton, 

 as Areopagitica ; the historical 

 memoir-writing of Clarendon, His- 

 tory of the Rebellion all illustrate 

 the erudite, imaginative phrase- 

 ology, the splendid but not per- 

 fectly controlled harmony, the 

 too long and complex sentence- 

 structure of a prose which en- 

 riched our language, but was not 

 a fully developed and controlled 

 medium. 



A simpler style is traceable 

 in the antithetic sentences of 

 the character-writers, as Earle's 

 Microcosmographie; the prose of 

 moderate divines like Chilling- 

 worth, The Religion of Protes- 

 tants, and Hales, Golden Remains ; 

 and the virile, well-girt style of the 

 philosopher Hobbes, Leviathan. 

 The strain of racy colloquialism in 

 17th century prose, coloured by a 

 sensitive and imaginative tempera- 

 ment, and enriched by the sub- 

 limer phraseology of the English 

 Bible, gives individuality to the 

 Grace Abounding to the Chief of 

 Shiners and Pilgrim's Progress of 

 John Bunyan. A gentler temper 

 sweetens the talkative prose of 

 Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, 

 and Lives, and the multifarious, 

 witty writings of Thomas Fuller. 

 The new prose, colloquial but 

 urbane and weighty, begins in the 

 Sermons of Tillotson and South, 

 the Essays of Sir William Temple, 

 and, above all, in the prefaces and 

 essays of John Dryden, whose 



