To the followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in the intenser loyalty of troubled times.

The most finished of them is perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick.

At the end of them came Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.
(3) The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human knowledge.

The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation which was revolutionizing science and philosophy.

For the first time the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research, and though Bacon in his _Novum Organum_ adhered to the older mode its disappearance was rapid.