The Period of Milton. final masterpiece of translation, the English Bible of 1611. Meanwhile there were minor phases of literature: the name of Hakluyt, the collector of so many records of exploration, is still familiar; so is that of Richard Hooker, whose Ecclesiastical Polity remains the chief monument of religious controversy in the reign of Elizabeth. Poetry Xwas first, then, and supreme, but there was sonorous and thoughtful prose in philosophy and history alike; much matter of contemporary chronicle, such as Hakluyt's Voyages; and much controversial writing. y sort Throughout this literature there is one trait which the lapse of three centuries has tended to obscure. This is a sort of pristine alertness of mind, evident in innumerable details of Elizabethan style. One may best detect it, perhaps, by committing to memory random passages from Elizabethan plays. If the trait occurred only in the work of Shakspere, one might deem it a mere fresh miracle of his genius; but it occurs everywhere. Such literature as the Elizabethan world has left us bears witness throughout that the public for which it was made was quick of wit, and eager to enjoy a wide variety of literary effects. By the middle of the century, this trait had begun to fade out of English letters. Our brief list of mid-century publications revealed Milton, not as the chief of a school, but rather as the one great figure in a group of fastidiously careful minor poets and elaborate makers of overwrought rhetorical prose, often splendid but never simple. Fuller, Taylor, and Walton fairly typify seventeenth-century prose; to complete our impression of it we might glance at Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and at Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642). One term by which we may characterize this mid-century Eng lish literature, to distinguish it from what came before, is the term "deliberate." Mysteriously but certainly the spontaneity and versatility of Elizabethan days had disappeared. The literature of Cromwell's England was as different from that of Elizabeth's as Cromwell was from Walter Ralegh. tell the story. The names of Shakspere and Milton. riod of Dryden. The name of Dryden is as different from that of Milton The Peas Milton's is from Shakspere's. Though Dryden's Astræa Redux was published in 1660, seven years before Paradise Lost, Dryden died in 1700 amid a literature whose poetry had cooled into something like the rational form which deadened it throughout the century to come, and whose drama had for forty years been revealing new phases of decadence. But if poetry and the drama were for the moment sleeping, there were other kinds of English thought, if not of English feeling, which were full of life. Boyle (1627–1691) had done his work in chemistry; Newton (1642-1727) had created a whole realm of physical science; Locke (1632-1704) had produced his epoch-making Essay concerning Humane Understanding (1690); and, to go no further, the works of Sir William Temple (1628-1699) and the critical essays of Dryden himself had given English prose almost its final form. In literature, just as in history, we find, the seventeenth century reveals three distinct English epochs, each different from the others and all together involving such changes in the national temperament as to make the The England of Dryden almost as foreign to that of Shak- Change of spere as the temper of King William III was to Queen Temper. Elizabeth's. Like Elizabethan England, Elizabethan literature seems different from anything which we can National now know in the flesh. One can hardly imagine feeling quite at home in the Mermaid Tavern with Beaumont and Ben Jonson and the rest; but in modern London, or at least in the London of thirty years ago, one might sometimes feel that a few steps around a grimy corner should still lead to some coffee-house, where glorious John Dryden could be found sitting in robust, old-fashioned dictatorship over the laws of the language in which we ourselves think and speak and feel. For Dryden's England is not yet quite dead and gone. But dead and gone, or at least vanished from this earth, in Dryden's time almost as surely as in ours, was the spontaneous, enthusiastic, and versatile old England of Elizabeth. History and literature alike, in short, show us an England of the seventeenth century wherein the great central convulsion of dominant Puritanism fatally destroyed a youthful world, and gave us in its place a more deliberate, permanently different new one. III AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1600 TO 1700 REFERENCES GENERAL AUTHORITIES: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Student's History, 57-128; Thwaites, Colonies, Chapters iii-x, especially iii (outlining in general the English policy of colonization and discussing the religious position of the English emigrants), vi (on New England, 1620-1643), and viii (on social and economic conditions in New England in 1700). SPECIAL WORKS: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliographies at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, for minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliographies named below. BIBLIOGRAPHIES: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 92-130; Winsor's America, III-V. tion. It was in the first quarter of this seventeenth century that the American colonies were finally established. The first lasting settlement in Virginia was made in the spring of 1607; the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth towards the Colonizaend of 1620; Boston was founded less than ten years later; and from 1636 dates the oldest of native American corporations, that of Harvard College. At the latest of these dates, which are less than a full generation apart, the tragic reign of Charles I was not half finished; at the earliest, Queen Elizabeth had lain less than five years in Westminster Abbey. From these facts may be inferred another, which has been comparatively neglected: every leading man among the first settlers both of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay was born under Queen Elizabeth herself. William Bradford of Plymouth, for example, was born in 1590, The First of Eliza- the year when Spenser published the first books of the Faerie Queene; and Edward Winslow was born in 1595, when Shakspere had published only Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Thomas Dudley is said to have been born in 1576, some ten years before the execution of Mary Stuart. John Winthrop was born in 1588, the year of the Invincible Armada. John Cotton was born in 1585, the year before Sir Philip Sidney was killed, when, for aught we know, Shakspere had not yet emerged from Stratford, and when surely John Foxe (1516-1587), the martyrologist, was still alive. Thomas Hooker was born only a year later, in 1586. Richard Mather was only ten years younger, born in the year when Ben Jonson's first play is said to have been acted, when Ralegh published his Discovery of Guiana, and Spenser the last three books of his Faerie Queene. Roger Williams was born in 1600, the year which gave us the first quartos of Henry IV, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing. And what is thus true of New England is truer still of Virginia, founded half a generation earlier. Though the sovereigns to whom both northern and southern colonies owed their first allegiance were Stuarts, all the founders of these colonies were of true Elizabethan birth. They were not, to be sure, quite the kind of Elizabethans who expressed themselves in poetry. The single work produced in America which by any stretch of language may be held a contribution to Elizabethan letters is a portion of George Sandys' translation of Ovid made during his sojourn in Virginia between 1621 and 1624. In general, the settlers of Virginia were of the adventurous type which expresses itself far more in action than in words; while |