depravity is only a theological name for that phase of life which moderns name the struggle for existence; and likewise election is only a theological name for what our newer fashion calls the survival of the fittest. Now, any struggle is bound to be at its fiercest where the struggling forces are most concentrated. In human affairs, both good and evil struggle hardest where human beings are most densely congregated. Augustine wrote in a world still formally dominated by that imperial power of Rome whose health and strength were gone. Calvin wrote in the populous Europe of the Renaissance, where the whole system of medieval life was doomed, and where the pressure of economic fact was already forcing the more adventurous spirits of every European race to explore our Western Hemisphere. Noble, too, though we may find the traditions of that merry old England, which was so vital under Queen Elizabeth, which faded under the first two Stuarts, and which vanished in the smoke of the Civil Wars, the plain records, both of history and of literature, show it to have been a dense, wicked old world, whose passions ran high and deep, and whose vices and crimes, big as its brave old virtues, were such as to make the grim dogmas of the Puritans seem to many earnest minds the only explanation of so godless a fact as human life. Ideals. God's will be done on earth, then, the Puritans cried, Puritan honestly conceiving this divine will to demand the political dominance of God's elect. The society over which they believed that these elect should make themselves politically dominant had all the complexity which must develop itself during centuries of national and social growth; and this growth, fortified by the unwritten Common Law of England, had taken through the centuries an earthly course at The variance with what the Puritans held to be their divinely sanctioned politics. Towards the end of Cromwell's dominance they tried to mend matters by giving England a written constitution. In many respects this Instrument of Government seems theoretically better than the older system which had grown under the unwritten Common Law, and which since Cromwell's time has developed into the Parliamentary government now controlling the British Empire. The Instrument of Government, however, had a mortal weakness: it was not historically continuous with the past; and this was enough to prevent any historical continuity with the future. The struggle for political existence in England was inevitably fatal to principles and ideals so little rooted in national life as those which the Puritans formulated. So in England, after the -momentary irruption of dominant Puritanism, the old Common Law surged back; and it has flowed on to the present day, the stronger if not the nobler of the two ideals of our race. The records which remain to us of Elizabethan England, and of the England which finally broke into civil war, seem to concern men of a remote past. Take, for example, the adventurer, Ralegh; the soldier and courtier, Essex; and, a little later, that most chivalrous of autobiographers, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. All three are marked by a big, simple, youthful spontaneity. Take, equally at random, three other names which belong to the years after Cromwell's dominant Puritanism had failed: Samuel Pepys, the diarist; Halifax, the great Trimmer; and John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Though by no means contemporary with ourselves, these seem, in comparison with the elder group, almost modern,-old-fash ioned men rather than men of an earlier type than those we live with. The contrast is typical. The England which came before Cromwell, the England which we may name "Elizabethan," vanished when Puritan dominance broke for a while the progress of English constitutional law; the England which came afterwards, whatever its merits or its faults, lacked, as England has continued to lack ever since the Restoration, certain traits which we all feel in the old Elizabethan world. bethan For our purpose there is hardly anything more important than to realize, if we can, what these Elizabethan traits Three were, which distinguish the England before Cromwell's Elizatime from that which has come after him. Perhaps we Traits. shall have done a little to remind ourselves of what Elizabethan England possessed, when we begin to feel how throughout that older time we find three characteristics which in later days are more and more rare, spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility. The Three II ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1700 REFERENCES For this chapter, as for the others on English literary history, the general authorities (see p. vii) are sufficient. Whoever wishes more about this period may consult George Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Literature, London: Macmillan, 1887, and A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 3 vols., London: Macmillan, 1899. THE Social history of seventeenth-century England groups itself in three parts: that which preceded the dominant Puritanism of the Commonwealth; the dominant Puritanism itself; and what came after. All three of these phases of English life found expression in literature. Between 1600 and 1605 appeared plays by Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Shakspere, Marston, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman; Florio's translation of Montaigne; Campion's Art of English Poetry; and, among many other lesser works, the last volume of Hakluyt's Voyages. Between 1648 and 1652 appeared works by Fuller, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Bunyan, Izaak Walton, and George Herbert. Finally, between 1695 and 1700 appeared plays by Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh; and works of one sort or another by Bentley, Defoe, Evelyn, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dryden; not to speak of Tate and Brady's version of the Psalms. These random lists will suggest the outline of the literary history we need to keep in mind. The beginning of the century marked the height of Elizabethan literature, in which the central figure is Shakspere. Among the men who were writing in the middle. of the century, men in whom the Elizabethan spirit was no longer strong, one rose almost as superior to the rest as Shakspere had been fifty years before. That one of course, is Milton (1608–1674). In the last five years of the century, there was another group, as different from either of the others as were the periwigs of Marlborough from the jewelled caps of Sir Walter Ralegh; and in this last group, as in the others, one figure emerges from the rest. Here that figure is John Dryden (1631–1700), the first great maker of heroic couplets, and the first masterly writer of such English prose as we now feel to be modern. It is worth our while to glance in turn at each of these literary periods, the periods of Shakspere, of Milton, and of Dryden. The Pe riod of shak Elizabethan literature, in which Shakspere now appears supreme, is at once the first, and in many respects the greatest, of the schools or periods of letters which con- spere. stitute modern English literature. Marked throughout by spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility, this period is clearly marked as well by the fact that it brought to final excellence two kinds of poetry, the lyric, and a little later the dramatic. In thinking of Elizabethan literature, one is accordingly apt to forget that it includes noble prose as well. Yet no reader of English can long forget that to this same period belong the scientific work and the later essays of Bacon. It was within the first fifteen years of the seventeenth century, too, that Ralegh, in the Tower, was writing his History of the World; and that various masterly translations were accompanying the growth of that |