Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity, that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous and proper to the soil that we often hear them objected to us by some of our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful expressions.... Even the position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English blood, as well as the embraces of the Ocean, seem to join with the labours of the _Royal Society_ to render our country a Land of Experimental Knowledge." The excellent Sprat was the friend and executor of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface to his _Poems_ a charming passage about the relation of literature to the external circumstances in which it is written. "If _wit_ be such a _Plant_ that it scarce receives heat enough to keep it alive even in the _summer_ of our cold _Clymate_, how can it choose but wither in a long and a sharp _winter_? a warlike, various and a tragical age is best to write _of_, but worst to write _in_." And he adds this, concerning his own art of poetry: "There is nothing that requires so much serenity and chearfulness of _spirit_; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of _Life_, or overcast with the _Clouds_ of _Melancholy_ and _Sorrow_, or shaken and disturbed with the storms of injurious _Fortune_; it must, like the _Halcyon_, have fair weather to breed in. The Soul must be filled with bright and delightful _Idaeas_, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others, which is the main end of _Poesie_. One may see through the stile of _Ovid de Trist._, the humbled and dejected condition of _Spirit_ with which he wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that _Genius_, _Quem nec Jovis ira, nec ignes_, etc. The _cold_ of the country has strucken through all his faculties, and benummed the very _feet_ of his _Verses_."