In the foregoing study of the attitude of the classical poets toward Nature certain dominant characteristics have been indicated, all of them pointing to a lack of interest in Nature. The attention of the age was concentrated elsewhere. Not Nature, but man was the supreme interest. And the limitations must be drawn even more closely, for the interest was not in man as man according to the democratic spirit of the succeeding romantic age, nor in man as a creature of daring, of wild passions, of lawless enthusiasms, of boundless energies, as in the preceding Elizabethan age, but man as part of a well-organized social system. Man in London was the central thought of the age. This supremacy of the interest in man accounts for the acknowledged preference for city life. In the country bad roads and poor conveyances effectually separated men from each other. In the city the wits of the coffee-house and the beaux and belles of the drawing-room were able to gain the social converse and mutual admiration necessary to their happiness. What they had to say to each other was incomparably more interesting than any revelation from Nature’s solitary places. Men feared and disliked mountains and the sea because these natural features stood as obstacles to the easy pursuit of many pleasures, and because in the presence of forces so vast and elemental men felt themselves overawed and threatened. What they could not understand and conquer was their foe. They turned uneasily from all forms of Nature that suggest mysterious, unseen forces over which man has no control. The limitless spaces of the sky, the “solemn midnight’s tingling silentness,” the magical charm of moonlight, whatever is infinite in its suggestiveness, drawing the spirit of man into the vast, shadowy realms of the unknown, filled them with dismay. In Nature as in everything else they instinctively confined themselves to such portions of truth as they could clearly state and use. The kind of Nature they loved was that in which man was easily supreme. Their delight in cultivated rural England was largely based on its power of ministering to man’s ease and physical well-being.[196] Their delight in the formal garden grew out of their pleasure in seeing the triumphal expenditure of human effort. There Nature was “rhymed and twisted and harmonized” at pleasure. Man’s supremacy was nowhere else more effectually acknowledged. Not art concealed but art manifest was the ideal. Evelyn’s enjoyment of French and Italian gardens is almost always based on his pleasure in some mechanical device whereby man had conquered Nature.[197] What Cowley most enjoyed in the country was the sense of his own skill and mastery. The “best natured” satisfaction of all is, he says, the husbandman’s delight in “looking round about him and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art.”[198] The supremacy of the interest in man is further explanatory