English was proving itself too flexible an instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected.

It was applied too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and homely Latimer ever dreamed of.

The preachers, though their golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here.

The men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like way outside our province.

For the purpose of the literary student the achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate men or books--in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne.
In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to examine the causes that have produced such great results.