n Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration, was
a good Republican, and wrote a fine _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return
from Ireland_. There is also a rare imaginative quality in his _Song of
the Exiles in Bermuda_, _Thoughts in a Garden_, and _The Girl Describes
her Fawn_. George Wither, who was imprisoned for his satires, also took
the side of the Parliament, but there is little that is distinctively
Puritan in his poetry.

* * * * *

1. Milton's Poetical Works. Edited by David Masson.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1882. 3 vols.

2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F.D. Myers.
New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883. (Parchment Series.)

3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1868.

4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides. London: George Routledge
& Sons, 1885. (Morley's Universal Library).

5. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia.
Edited by Willis Bund. Sampson Low & Co., 1873.

6. Thomas Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields, 1863.

7. Walton's Complete Angler. Edited by Sir Harris
Nicolas. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.

CHAPTER V.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE.

1660-1744.

The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose,
from passion and imagination to wit and the understanding. The serious,
exalted mood of the civil war and Commonwealth had spent itself and
issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical,
skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The
characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and
burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English
literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The age
was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal Society, for
the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662. There were
able divines in the pulpit and at the universities--Barrow, Tillotson,
Stillingfleet, South, and others: scholars, like Bentley; historians,
like Clarendon and Burnet; scientists, like Boyle and Newton;
philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke. But of poetry, in any high sense of
the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of
Goldsmith and Gray.

The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the
contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Moliere, the
tragedies of Corneille and Racine