Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/15

Rh where he had studied for two years, in Rome and Siena, as Carnegie Scholar. To him, and to others who helped me by reading the proofs, I would express my gratitude. If I do not name them all, it is for fear of making them appear in any way responsible for my errors and oversights. From the outset I have been indebted to the unwearied patience and invaluable criticisms of the general editor. My former pupil, Mr George Herbert Mair, Scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, has supplied the index.

In the last chapter I have endeavoured to indicate some of the forces at work in the period. But I have not felt able to open with a general view, for the epoch does not seem to admit of any such clear general description as does, say, that which follows. All the literatures touched on here have a common debt to Italy and the Classics. In the development, however, which followed the stimulating influence of the Renaissance, each is, in the earlier seventeenth century, at a very different stage. Italy herself is falling into the background, though the superficial influence of Marino is so widespread that a reader might do well to turn to the chapter on Italy among the first. In France, the influence of the Renaissance is practically exhausted, and, despite a taste for Italian and Spanish fashions, the distinctively national movement towards clear thought and symmetrical form proceeds apace. During the first ten years of the century, English literature is still in the full flush of the late Elizabethan efflorescence, but passes, as the century goes on, through a period of very independent and complex changes, determined