Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another dimension; it is out of time.

To define this seventeenth century spirit, then, one must look at the literature of the age as a whole.

What is there that one finds in it which marks a change in temperament and outlook from the Renaissance, and the time which immediately followed it?
Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit.

We began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous since the break up of the Roman Empire.

The men of the Renaissance felt themselves to be modern.