wits, and artists, between whom and Puritanism a kind of natural enmity subsisted, sought, with few exceptions, the royal camp, where they were probably more noisy than serviceable. On the other hand, the Parliament was supported by the great middle class, and by the yeomen or small landed proprietors. It had at first but one poet (Wither was then a royalist), but that one was John Milton.

The King's cause became hopeless after the defeat of Naseby in 1645; and after a lengthened imprisonment he was brought to the block by the army and the Independents, ostensibly as a traitor and malefactor against his people; really, because, while he lived, the revolutionary leaders could never feel secure. There is a significant query in one of Cromwell's letters, written in 1648, whether "Salus populi summa lex be not a sound maxim.'

6

But before the fatal window in Whitehall the reaction in the public sentiment and conscience commenced. Cromwell, indeed, carried on the government with consummate ability and vigour; but after all he represented only his own stern genius, and the victorious army which he had created; and when he died, and in the rivalries of his generals the power of that army was neutralized, England, by a kind of irresistible gravitation, returned to that position of defined and prescriptive freedom which had been elaborated during the long course of the middle ages.

3. At the Restoration (1660), the courtiers, wits, and poets returned from exile not uninfluenced, whether for good or evil, by their long sojourn abroad; the Anglican clergy saw their church established on a firmer footing than ever; and their Puritan adversaries, ejected and silenced, passed below the surface of society, and secretly organized the earlier varieties of that many-headed British dissent which now numbers nearly half the people of England among its adherents. The theatres were reopened; and every loyal subject-to prove himself no Puritan -tried to be as wild, reckless, and dissolute as possible. Yet in the course of years the defeated party, with changed tactics indeed, and in a soberer mood, began to make itself felt. Instead of asking for a theocracy, they now agitated for toleration; and, renouncing their republicanism as impracticable, they took up the watchword of constitutional reform. The Puritans and Roundheads of the civil war reappear towards the close of Charles II.'s reign under the more permanent appellation of the Whig party.

One of the points in which the party was found least altered after its transformation was its bitter and traditional hostility

to the Church of Rome. Hence, after it became known that the heir-presumptive to the crown, James Duke of York, had changed his religion, the Whigs formed the design of excluding him on that ground from the throne, and placing the crown upon the head of the next Protestant heir. The party of the court and the cavaliers (who began about this time to be called Tories) vigorously opposed the scheme, and with success. James II. succeeded in 1685, and immediately began to take measures for the relief of Catholics from the many disabilities under which they laboured. But he pursued his object with all the indiscretion and unfairness habitual to his family. Though the Whigs had been defeated and cowed,-though the great majority of the nation desired to be loyal,-though the Anglican clergy in particular had committed themselves irrevocably to the position that a king ought to be obeyed, no matter to what lengths he might go in tyranny,-James so managed matters as almost to compel the divines to eat their own words, and, by forfeiting the affection and confidence of the people, to throw the game into the hands of the Whigs. The Revolution came; James II. was expelled; the Act of Settlement was passed; and the Catholics of England again became an obscure and persecuted minority, which for a hundred years almost disappears from the public gaze and from the page of history.

Under William III., from 1688 to 1700, there was a lull, comparatively speaking, in political affairs. The Toleration Act, passed in 1689, amounted to a formal renunciation of the claim of the state-on account of which so much blood had been shed in this and the previous century-to impose religious uniformity upon its subjects. Towards the middle of William's reign the Tories began to recover from the stunning effects of the moral shock which they had sustained at the Revolution; and the modern system of parliamentary government, though complicated for a time by the question of Jacobitism, began to develope its outlines out of the strife of the opposing parties.

Having thus reviewed the course of events, we proceed to describe the development of ideas, as expressed in literature, during the same period.

Poetry before the Restoration; Jonson: The Fantastic School; Cowley, Crashaw, &c.; Milton, Marvell.

4. Under the Stuarts the court still, as in the days of Elizabeth, opened its gates gladly to the poets and playwrights. Jonson's chief literary employment during his later years was the composition of masques for the entertainment of the king

and royal family. That quarrelsome, reckless, intemperate man, whose pedantry must have been insufferable to his contemporaries had it not been relieved by such flashes of wit, such a flow of graceful simple feeling, outlived by many years the friends of his youth, and died, almost an old man, in 1637. His beautiful pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd was left unfinished at his death. To a collection of his miscellaneous poems he gave the strange title of 'Underwoods.' No. XV. is the famous epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke :—

Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,

Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learn'd, and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee!

A diligent reader of Jonson's masques will find, scattered up and down them, some of the airiest and prettiest songs in the world. Rise, Cynthia, rise,' is one of these; another is the merry catch in the Masque of Oberon, beginning

Buz, quoth the blue flie,

Hum, quoth the bee;
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we.

Among the numerous epigrams, this is noteworthy:

Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live.

The famous song 'To Celia,' which begins

Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine---

is No. 9 in the group of poems called The Forest. The elegiac verses addressed To the memory of my beloved master, Wm. Shakspeare, and what he hath left us,' are interesting. Jonson's love of his subject seems to be genuine, and to transport him out of himself. Here occurs the fine line :

He was not of an age, but for all time.

The refinement, the true gentleness of Shakspere's nature are glanced at in the following lines, which may be compared with what Lydgate wrote of Chaucer (ante, ch. i. § 71) :—

made the basis for the formation of distinct departments of knowledge. In the seventeenth century, the human mind, even among the most advanced communities, had still much of the presumptuous forwardness natural to children and savages. The complexity of natural phenomena was partly unknown, partly under-estimated. Instead of sitting down humbly as a disciple, and endeavouring to decipher here and there a few pages of nature's book, man still conceived himself to stand immeasurably above nature, and to possess within his own resources, if the proper key could only be found, the means of unlocking all her secrets, and compelling her subservience to his wants.

If Bacon's philosophical labours had been of no other service than to beat down this presumptuous temper, and explode this notion of the finality of science, they must have been regarded as of inestimable value. He shared to the full in the eager and sanguine temper which we have shown to be characteristic of the age; he takes for his motto Plus ultra; he revels in the view of the immensity of the field lying open before the human faculties; and the title-page of the original edition of his Instauratio Magna bears the meaning portraiture of a ship in full sail, with a consort following in her wake, bearing down to pass between the fabled Pillars of Hercules, the limit of the knowledge, and almost of the aspirations, of the ancient world. He repeats more than once that in the sciences opinion of store is found to be one of the chief causes of want.' He is unjust, indeed, in attributing this presumptuous persuasion of the completeness of science to Aristotle, whom he sometimes strangely depreciates, even going so far as to say that in the general wreck of learning consequent upon the invasion of the Empire by the barbarians, the flimsy and superficial character of Aristotle's system buoyed it up, when the more solid and valuable works of the earlier philosophers perished. It is true that those who had attempted to philosophize, ever since the time of Aristotle, had been unduly influenced by his great name, and had often acquiesced blindly in his conclusions. Aristotle, however, is not justly chargeable with the errors of his followers.

It is clear that Bacon was keenly alive to the comparative worthlessness of all that had been done by the philosophers who preceded him towards a real knowledge of nature. What made him prize this knowledge so highly? Not so much its own intrinsic value, nor even its effects on the mind receiving it, as the persuasion which he felt that, if obtained, it would give to man an effective command over nature. For his aim in philosophizing was eminently practical; he loved philosophy chiefly because of the immense utility which he felt certain lay enfolded

in it, for the improving and adorning of man's life. This is the meaning of the well-known Baconian axiom, 'Knowledge is power.' To know nature would always involve, he thought, the power to use her for our own purposes; and it seems that he would have cared little for any scientific knowledge of phenomena which remained barren of practical results.

83. The end, therefore, was to know nature in order to make use of her; from this end all previous philosophy had wandered away and lost itself. Let us try now to conceive distinctly what Bacon believed himself to have accomplished for its realization. In few words, he believed that he had discovered an intellectual instrument of such enormous power, that the skilful application of it would suffice to resolve all the problems which the world of sense presents to us. This new instrument,' or Novum Organum, he describes in the book so named. Armed with this, he considered that an ordinary intellect would be placed on a par with the most highly gifted minds; and this supposed fact he uses to defend himself from the charge of presumption, since, he says, it is not a question of mental gifts or powers, but of methods; and just as a weak man, armed with a lever, may, without presumption, think he can raise a greater weight than a strong man using only his bare strength, so the inquirer into nature, who has found out the right road or method, may, without vanity, expect to make greater discoveries than he, however great his original powers, who is proceeding by the wrong road. The instrument thus extolled is the Baconian' method of instances,' of which it may be well here to give a short account.

Let it be premised that the object of the philosopher is to ascertain the form, that is, the fundamental law, of some property common to a variety of natural objects. He must proceed thus: First, he prepares a table of instances, in all of which the property is present; as, for example,—in the case of heat,—the sun's rays, fire, wetted hay, &c. Secondly, he prepares a table of instances, apparently cognate to those in the first table, or some of them, in which, nevertheless, the given property is absent. Thus, the moon's rays, though, like those of the sun, they possess illuminating powers, give out no heat. Thirdly, he prepares a table of degrees, or a comparative table, showing the different degrees in which the property is exhibited in different instances. Fourthly, by means of the materials accumulated in the three preceding tables, he constructs a table

1 Novum Organum, book ii. ch. 17: The form of heat, or of light, means exactly the same as the law of heat, or the law of light.'