s of Elisabeth, James I.,
and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in
1666, and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of
Charles I. and the Commonwealth.

In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking
the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there
is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend
themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of
thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without
its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater
relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished
writer of {136} the time lent his pen to one or the other party in the
great theological and political controversy of the time. There were
famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians
and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such
as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and
writers in rural science--which now entered upon its modern,
experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom
may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist, and
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These are
outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time,
the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition
to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject which is proper to
the scientific attitude of mind. The line between true and false
science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and
appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such
monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy
of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_,
or _Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors_, 1646. The former of
these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his
own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from
which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of barge-men, and
in compiling this _Anatomy_, in which the causes, symptoms,
prognostics, and cures of {137} melancholy are considered in numerous
partitions, sections, members, and subsections. The work is a mosaic
of quotations. All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and
instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way
learni