Simplicity indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile and ingenious mind.

The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse.

He bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or Newton, or Descartes.
[Footnote 2: Prof.Grierson in _Cambridge History of English Literature_.] The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary revolution imperative.

The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they have been called (Dr.Johnson called them the metaphysical poets), produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat exotic religiousness of Crashaw.

In the hands of Cowley the use of far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died.