ty years or more, from 1575 to 1625,
or somewhat later), in which the human faculties, in their whole range,
both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion
as they had never before reached in the history of the world,--
that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher,
Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list
of great names might be continued),--that great age, I say,
was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous
in comparison with their own. But beneath all, still lay
the restorative elements of the English character, which were to
reassert themselves and usher in a new era of literary productiveness,
the greatest since the Elizabethan age, and embodying
the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained.
We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life,
but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness
of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with him,
and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly
the state of things, or rather the degree to which the state of things
was pushed.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, or somewhat earlier,
the rise of the spiritual tide is distinctly observable.
We see a reaction setting in against the soulless poetry
which culminated in Alexander Pope, whose `Rape of the Lock'
is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact, the most brilliant
society-poem in the literature. De Quincey pronounces it to be,
though somewhat extravagantly, "the most exquisite monument
of playful fancy that universal literature offers." Bishop Warburton,
one of the great critical authorities of the age, believed in
the infallibility of Pope, if not of THE Pope.

To notice but a few of the influences at work: Thomson sang
of the Seasons, and invited attention to the beauties of
the natural world, to which the previous generation had been blind
and indifferent. Bishop Percy published his `Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry', thus awakening a new interest in the old ballads
which had sprung from the heart of the people, and contributing much
to free poetry from the yoke of the conventional and the artificial,
and to work a revival of natural unaffected feeling. Thomas Tyrwhitt
edited in a scholarly and appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales
of Chaucer. James McPherson published w