Clarendon, with his magnificently involved style, began his famous _History of the Great Rebellion_ in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes published the _Leviathan_, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter, with his _Saints' Everlasting Rest_ sent a book of religious consolation into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his _Religio Medici_; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his _Compleat Angler_ how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller, born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town, Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his _Holy and Profane State_, a collection of brief and brisk character sketches, which come nearer modern prose than anything of that time; while for inspired thought and purity of diction the _Holy Living_, 1650, and the _Holy Dying_, 1651, of Jeremy Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preëminent in the prose of the Commonwealth. But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for definite chronology, we should scarcely realize that they worked in the same century. While, therefore, no sketch of seventeenth-century literature can exclude Milton, he must be taken by himself, without relation to the development, forms, and spirit of his age, and must be regarded, rather, as a late-born Elizabethan. When Dryden was born, Milton at twenty-three was just completing his seven years at Cambridge, and as the younger poet grew through boyhood, the elder was enriching English verse with his _Juvenilia_. Then came the twenty years of strife. As Secretary of the Commonwealth, he threw himself into controversial prose. His _Iconoclast_, the _Divorce_ pamphlets, the _Smectymnuus_ tracts, and the _Areopagitica_ date from this period. A strong partisan of the Commonwealth, he was in emphatic disfavor at the Restoration. Blind and in hiding, deserted by one-time friends, out of sympathy with his age, he fulfilled the promise of his youth: he turned again to poetry; and in _Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_ he has left us "something so written that the world shall not willingly let it die." I have said that Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of his age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite other than _L'Allegro_ and _Lycidas_. In the closing years of the preceding century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet Marino was developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under similar influences adopted similar methods.