Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/223

Rh useful as it might be to retain the latter for works addressed solely to the world of scholars.

The note which Hooker struck, the note of gravity and dignity, remained the dominant one throughout at any rate that portion of the seventeenth century with which this volume deals. Prose, like poetry, felt the strain of the growing seriousness and combativeness of the age, the increasing intellectuality of temper. Pure poetry is somewhat of an exotic in the seventeenth century; even Milton's purest poetry is his earliest. Both poetry and prose are enlisted in the service of religious controversy or the growing interest in science and philosophy. The earlier seventeenth century cannot be called an age of prose, in the sense that its temper is prosaic. It was not, like the next age, suspicious of enthusiasm: enthusiasm was too much the air it breathed. But that enthusiasm was not, as in the years which produced the Faerie Queene or Shakespeare's historical plays, the joyous enthusiasm of a nation awakened to a sense of its own greatness and the charm of letters, and not yet profoundly divided against itself. It is inquiring and combative, fanatical sometimes, often satirical and scornful, melancholy, occasionally mystical, hardly, even arrogantly, intellectual. Learning is its idol, "an immoderate hydroptic thirst of learning." The old learning, scholastic and traditional, subtle and argumentative, revives with vigour in the work of the ecclesiastical and theological controversialists at the very time that in the writings of Bacon and Hobbes the new