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BIBLIOGRAPHY.

THOMAS MORUS.-Utopia (Robinson's English translation, 1556) in Arber's Reprints (No. 14); Mackintosh, Life of Sir Thomas More; Baumstark, Thomas More.

ASCHAM.-Toxophilus and Schoolmaster, in Arber's Reprint (Nos. 7 and 23); Katterfeld, R. Ascham, sein Leben und seine Schriften; Kirsten, Ueber Ascham's Leben und Schriften.

HOOKER.-Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (several recent editions).

LYLY.-Reprint by Arber, Landmann; Bodenstedt, Shakespeare's_Zeitgenossen, vol. iii.; Landmann, Euphuismus ; Child, John Lyly and Euphuism.

SIDNEY.-Complete works in three vols. (1721); poems, by Grosart (2 vols.); Defence of Poesie, in Arber's Reprints (No. 4); J. A. Symonds, in English Men of Letters (No. 37); Fox Bourne, Memoir of Sir Philip Sydney; J. Lloyd, Life of Sir Philip Sydney; W. Stigand, Sir Philip Sydney; The Life and Times of Sir Philip Sydney (anonymous, Boston, 1859).

BACON.-Best recent edition of his works by Spedding; a Harmony of the Essays, in Arber's Reprints (No. 27); a good selection from his works by Grosart (1893); Spedding, Letters and Life of Lord Bacon; W. H. Dixon, Personal History of Lord Bacon; Macaulay, Essay on Bacon; Craik, Bacon, his Writings and his Philosophy; Rémusat, Bacon, sa vie, son temps, etc.; K. Fischer, Bacon, die Realphilosophie und ihr Zeitalter; F. Nicol, Francis Bacon; Church, Bacon; E. Abbott, Francis Bacon; G. Fonsegrive, Francis Bacon. On the Bacon-Shakespeare question see p. 179.

HOLINSHED.-Chronicles in six folio volumes (1807).

BURTON.-Anatomy of Melancholy (1804).

BIBLE.-Reprint of the 1611 edition (Clarendon Press); Forshall and Madden, The Holy Bible by Wyclif and his Followers; B. F. Westcott, History of the English Bible W. T. Moulton, the same; New Testament revised, with the text of 1611 (Clarendon Press).

BOOK III

THE PERIOD OF THE CIVIL WARS

SEVENTEenth cenTURY

TH

CHAPTER I

THE PURITANS AND LITERATURE

HE struggle between "Cavaliers and Roundheads," in Parliament and on the battle-field, affected England, from a literary point of view, in much the same way as the Thirty Years' religious War affected Germany. To Germany the Thirty Years' War brought a long period of political decay, weakness without and disruption within; for England, which is indebted to its Civil War for the firm foundation of its present civil liberty, it was the ruin of a great literary revival, the poetical renaissance.

The expression "merry old England" is no empty phrase at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This merriment, which, while not ridiculing the future, does not despise the present world, stands out clearly in the literature, arts, manners, and dress of the English people. The victory of Puritanism shifted the centre of gravity of human life, it filled men with disgust of things earthly and at the same time with the fear of hell.

But it also brought about something else; a more radical change in English national feeling than had ever been known in the history of any other people. Puritanism almost hebraised the English; not that it filled them with the true spirit of the Bible, but it covered their language and national life with a veneer of outward biblicism, which is only now gradually being removed. In the seventeenth century the English were on the point of becoming the people of the Bible, the people of the Old Testament. We need only read the strict ordinances for keeping the "Sabbath" (not "Sunday") holy. No one was to travel or carry any burden on that day "under a penalty of ten shillings for each traveller and five shillings for each burden"; parents, whose children had been guilty of playing at home, were obliged to pay twelve pence for every such offence, and, if unable to do so, were put "in the stocks." The middle of the seventeenth century is responsible for the notorious English Sunday, with its outward ecclesiasticism and its crowds of drunken men and women in the gutters of the great towns. That was the time when the zealous spirit of sanctimoniousness

and lip-holiness discovered entirely new sins. It was considered a sin to walk about in smart clothes or to wear one's hair curled; the Cavaliers' way of dressing the hair, known as the "love lock," was an especial abomination to the Puritans. A starched lace collar was a sin; so was the reading of Spenser's Fairy Queen. And, in Puritan literature, behind sin was death, and behind death, hell. In the eyes of the Puritans the earth was a vast house of correction under Draconian rules; even their uniform, ugly dress had something of the convict about it.

Under Elizabeth and James the Puritans had been rigorously sup pressed; the harsh sentence passed upon the fanatic Prynne for his Histriomastix (p. 203) and his subsequent triumphant liberation are signs of the increasing power of Puritanism under James I. and Charles I. The Puritans had been ridiculed, persecuted, and imprisoned; but the history of Puritanism has confirmed the fact that persecutions cannot uproot a deep religious conviction. Unfortunately, persecutions do not exercise an ennobling influence upon the persecuted; in its hour of victory Puritanism showed itself as intolerant of heterodoxy as the Spanish inquisition; so imperious and so eager to introduce repressive police measures, that the people greeted the Restoration under Charles II. as a deliverance from an intolerable yoke. The Puritan dictators in Parliament had carried a law, whereby the celebration of the most popular Christian festival, Christmas, was forbidden as "contrary to Scripture" and "sinful." Everything which could afford innocent amusement was a sin. The acclamations with which the son of the beheaded Stuart entered his capital on May 29th, 1660, proclaimed how terribly the burden of the dull Puritanism, so antagonistic to life and art, had weighed upon the people; and the frenzied joy, to which the writers of Charles II.'s time abandoned themselves, sounded like a mockery of the insipid mimicry of Old Testament life and of the pharisaical Hebrew manner of thought and speech-snuffling, psalm-singing, and hypocritical—which for a quarter of a century had held sway over England.

Macaulay, an historian certainly by no means favourably disposed towards Charles II., speaks as follows in his History of England of the momentous influence of Puritanism upon art :—

Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were delivered over to Puritan stonemasons to be made decent. . . . One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England should forthwith be hewn down.

What Puritanism meant for literature is shown by its furious outbursts against the theatres: the penalisation of the harmless Fairy

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