ing, and it embodies the author's dream of human improvement through the advancement of knowledge. One feature of Bacon's work is his plan for a great university of research, called "Solomon's House," to be founded by the people of the island "for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of man." Upon this hint the Royal Society was later established. Among the inventions anticipated by Bacon's university are the aeroplane, the telephone, the microscope, and the submarine.

Of Bacon's Essays, ten were published in 1597, thirtyeight in 1612, sixty-eight in 1625. They are "certain brief notes set down rather significantly than carefully." By an essay he meant the first trial, or weighing, of a subject rather than something finished. He has made these essays pithy jottings in terse English, the notebook of a deep thinker on great affairs. Though evidently set down with little or no thought of their future fame, they have established their author as one of the greatest masters of English prose. He himself declared that he desired they should "come home to men's business and bosoms." "Of Truth," "Of Books," "Of Youth and Age," "Of Riches," "Of Discourse," "Of Studies," "Of Adversity," "Of Love," are but a few of the titles of these essays or trials of abstract subjects by a man who had weighed all things in his capacious mind and gave them forth in distilled form.

CHAPTER IV

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

1603-1688

HE death of the great Queen occurred in 1603, and

TH

with her passed the group of imaginative writers who had made her reign glorious. Though Shakespeare for a number of years continued to produce his tragic masterpieces, his ideals and methods were those of an earlier day. The century that followed, down to the year 1688, when the neo-classical spirit gave clear evidence of having come to stay, was a period of gradual transition from the imaginative freedom of the Renaissance to the ordered thinking of the modern world.

When James Stuart came to England in response to the wish of the dying queen, he carried with him a theory of royal power and a determination to impose it on the people that brought disastrous results in its train. After a bloody civil war, the popular cause, championed by the Puritans and their allies, triumphed. James's son, Charles I, paid the penalty on the block; and for a time the country remained under the domination of a religious sect, which set up a form of theocratic government, though the power actually rested in the hands of a despotic ruler, Oliver Cromwell. England was strong and great, but the intense, narrow vision which characterized the Puritan régime inevitably gave way to joyful reaction under the Merry Monarch, Charles II. The

licentiousness of the English court continued until the period of the Restoration came to an end, when James II fled his throne and William was called from Holland to assume the Crown and preserve English liberties.

The literature of the century also assumes three general phases, although they do not precisely correspond to the three historical periods. Indeed, the first half of the century presents a continued clash between the lessening imaginative vigor that had been the legacy of the preceding age and the sobriety of the Puritan mind. The age of Elizabeth in varying degrees combined a joyous acceptance of the good things of life with a strong undercurrent of seriousness. These two very different ways of viewing life are exhibited in harmonious proportions in both Spenser and Shakespeare; the one revealing the grave reflections of humanism and the pure paganism derived from the influence of Italy, the other growing from a lighthearted delight in comic and romantic aspects of life to a comprehension of the tragic depths of the soul. In them the pagan gayety was harmonized with the deep seriousness of those who strove after the joys of Eternity; but when the lofty imaginative impulse departed from literature, only the seriousness remained. The elder tradition, however, continued for many years with some loss of the old sanity and the old zest, growing more corrupt as it was subjected to the onslaughts of a vindictive enemy. That is to say, when a body of literature loses intimate contact with the life of the age which produces it, it tends to yield to more morbid and unwholesome influences and at last dies from lack of good nourishment. The Jacobean drama suffered in this way; other forms of literature did not meet a like destiny, yet an increasing frivolity and an aloofness from the political

struggle then in progress proved how little letters at this time of strenuous activity represented the national mind. Both the prose and the verse of the time illustrate these general tendencies.

Opposed to the dying drama, to the Cavalier poets, and to the scholarly prose writers stood the Puritan spirit, which was now becoming dominant and was soon to have its greatest representative in Milton. Milton, less narrow than others of the faith, inherited the wonderful imaginative inspiration of the Renaissance, yet he also expressed the Puritan ideals with a fair degree of completeness. Even before the publication of his great epic poems, came reaction under Charles II, running to the licentiousness and superficial brilliancy of the Restoration drama. Verse, ceasing altogether to portray the deeper emotions, became, in the hands of Dryden, a sharp instrument of personal and political satire; prose lost its formless character as it was made over into a flexible medium for every sort of expression. The neoclassic yoke lay upon the shoulders of men of letters, a literature appealing primarily to the reason gradually developed, and the exalted if somewhat uncontrolled imagination of the Renaissance yielded at last to the critical spirit which the growth of science was in the process of creating.

CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS OF SHAKESPEARE IN THE DRAMA

The history of the Jacobean drama may be summed up in a few words. To a people bound by an archaic convention comes an impulse of quickened imaginative activity, which irresistibly bursts its bonds, culminates in splen

did works of art, and declines into a new lifeless convention. That experience came to those who employed the superb vehicle through which the vital energy of Elizabeth's great time found expression. As the brief period of exalted living changed into a prolonged struggle between the Stuart kings and their Puritan adversaries, the drama lost its hold upon the affections of the people and appealed only to a narrow circle of dissolute courtiers. By 1612, nine years after the Queen's death, Shakespeare had completed the work of his life and Ben Jonson, the second in the roll of playwrights, had given to the world nearly all of his best plays. After that came decay, moral and literary, and another ten years brought to an end the production of plays of true merit.

career.

Two men of this time, by their eager curiosity about all sorts of things and their experimentation in every kind of dramatic work, ally themselves with the last decade of the preceding century. THOMAS DEKKER (1570–1637), like Greene and Marlowe, lived a vivid, reckless life, exhibiting a like careless art and want of literary conscience in writing his potboilers to pay for a vagabond The Shoemaker's Holiday is almost the only one of his works retaining charm for us to-day. It is a domestic comedy touching in a hearty, genial manner the life of the working people. It still remains in the repertoire of theatrical companies whenever they undertake to revive the best of our old plays. THOMAS HEYWOOD (1581?-1640?) illustrates even more the careless careers of these journeymen playwrights. In his time he composed 220 plays in which he had "either an entire hand, or at least a main finger," including tragi-comedies, chronicle histories, romances, and masques. Of all these an outstanding one is A Woman Killed with Kind