Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/382

362 in so far as they were also distinctly and admittedly men of letters. It is therefore on one or two of the larger aspects of the literature of the period alone that it is necessary in closing to dwell briefly, mainly with a view to defining as clearly as possible the relation of the period under consideration to those which precede and follow.

In certain aspects the literature of the early seventeenth century is a continuation of the literature of the Renaissance, the present volume a third chapter in the history whose first and second chapters are contained in Professor Saintsbury's Earlier Renaissance and Mr Hannay's Later Renaissance. This is notably the case as regards Holland and Germany, where the early years of the seventeenth century correspond, in the most important respects, to the last half of the sixteenth in France and England; although, of course, the very fact that the Renaissance movement came late in these countries was not without consequences for the literature which that movement produced. It came from the beginning under the influence of the religious agitations of the century.

It is especially in lyrical and dramatic poetry that the impulse of the Renaissance is still traceable in wellnigh all the literatures touched on here. The lyrical poetry of the Renaissance, that wonderful product, stimulated in its growth from Italy, but in all the countries north of the Alps striking a deeper root into the health-giving soil of