at he
designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope,
and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us
the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early
enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in
which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to
name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down
and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and
the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography
led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well
as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the
Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his
journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal
feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in
prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves
to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the
intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women. A minor form of
literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly
to the same need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a
contemporary type--a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the
like--was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened
taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson
had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended
to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the
portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual
living men and women of fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased
to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon
against opposing men and policies. The new generation of readers were
nothing if not critical. They were for testing directly institutions
whether they were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and
they wanted to take a side.

In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no less
remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he
had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a
Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between poetry and
Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death. The
essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissan