CHAPTER IV.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (1) With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away.
Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier, and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and their ideals belong to the earlier day.

The seventeenth century, not in England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking with it, and gave a new direction to human interest and to human affairs.

It is not perhaps easy to define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the time.

Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to give us much clue to altered conditions.

It is commonly in the work of lesser and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its fullest expression.