VI. THE LATER COMEDY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 123 VII. CRITICISM 149 VIII. PHILOSOPHY 155 IX. WRITERS ON GOVERNMENT 168 X. HISTORIES AND MEMOIRS OF PUBLIC TRANSACTIONS 177 XI. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY 195 XII. DIVINITY 221 XIII. BUNYAN AND OTHER WRITERS OF FICTION 233 XIV. ESSAYISTS AND LETTER WRITERS, LITERARY HISTORIANS 248 XV. ANTIQUARIANS AND MEN OF SCIENCE 259 XVI. TRAVELLERS 272 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 281 INDEX 285 THE AGE OF DRYDEN. INTRODUCTION. The accession of Charles II. as king _de facto_, which in the political history of England marks a Restoration, in her literary history marks a Revolution. Not that the transition from one mode of writing and thinking to another was instantaneous, or enjoined by legislative or academical decree. It had long been slowly progressing, and its unequivocal triumph would probably have come to pass sooner but for the obstruction to the intellectual life of the nation occasioned by twenty years of civil commotion. The magnitude of this impediment appears from the fact that all the writings of even so great a scholar and poet as Milton, produced during this interval, were of a polemical nature. When at last society found sufficient stability to allow its members to write for fame, emolument, or the extension of knowledge, it quickly became manifest how wide a gulf yawned between the men of that day and the men of twenty years ago. The new influence, indeed, had long been at work. A comparison, for example, of the last of the old dramatists, Massinger and Shirley, with their predecessors, evinces how much even in their day the stage was losing in poetry, in imagination, and in the charm of musical metre; how rapidly its personages were degenerating from vital individualities into conventional types; how much, on the other hand, always excepting Shakespeare's pieces from the comparison, it was gaining in logic and construction. An examination of other forms of literature would reveal a similar clarifying process, a steady discouragement of the quaint affectation which was the bane of Elizabethan literature, combined, unfortunately, with increasing sterility of fancy, and growing insensibility to the noble harmonies of which English prose is capable. An Elizabethan poet, indeed, Samuel Daniel, had in some of his works almost anticipated the style of the eighteenth century; in general, however, writers during the period of the Civil War seem to our apprehension more or less encrusted with the mellow patina of antiquity, conspicuously absent from nearly everyone