Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/393

Rh and Cats, Camphuysen and Van der Wiele, are all in different ways religious poets, bent on edification; even Brederoo wrote pious as well as humorous songs, and Luikeu's secular songs are his earliest.

But it is in England that the effects of the religious currents are most complex and striking, whether in verse or prose, in poets or divines. The reason is to be found in the position of the Anglican Church, the via media which she strove to make her own, between pure Bible Protestantism on the one hand and traditional Roman Catholicism on the other. The consequence of this peculiar position—the value of which was recognised by foreigners like Casaubon and Grotius—was that, when the reaction against Protestantism came, it did not necessarily drive a Crashaw, as it did Vondel, into the arms of Rome at once; nor, on the other hand, was it impossible for a Roman like Donne to justify himself in conforming. Whatever any one may think of the religious value of the Anglo-Catholic movement, there can at any rate be no doubt of the mark which it has left on English literature. The greatest preachers of these years are Andrewes and Donne and Taylor; and Donne and Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw, Traherne and King, are not the least interesting of the poets.

A direct result of the controversy between Canterbury and Rome, of the revival of theological and ecclesiastical studies, was a recrudescence of scholasticism; and one of the strangest phenomena in literature is the combination in Donne's poetry of the emancipated, moral and artistic, tone of the