Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/394

374 with the erudition and subtlety of a controversialist of the Counter-Reformation. Metaphysics was not something new in love-poetry; but since the time of Dante and some of his imitators, it was little more than a rhetorical dressing. In Donne's love-poetry there is a real metaphysical strain, while the range of erudition from which he draws his imagery was something altogether new. Donne's followers are none of them either so metaphysical or so erudite as himself. The metaphysics in the poetry of most of them is simply an ingenious and often far from beautiful rhetorical device. In the religious poets, however, the erudite imagery ministered to their theological didactic, as well as to that love of symbolism which has always belonged to the catholic religious temper.

The field of religious thought and feeling was not left entirely to Roman Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and orthodox Protestants—Calvinist and Lutheran. From the internecine conflict of churches and creeds some minds turned towards a more liberal thought, or a more mystical pietism. Hales, Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor sought to widen the basis of Anglicanism by reducing the essentials of unity in faith; and a little later, when Presbyterian orthodoxy had taken the place of Anglican, and when, despite Presbyterian effort, sects had begun to abound, a similar movement was initiated in the Puritan shades of Cambridge by the liberal and charitable Benjamin Whichcote (1610-1683), and the more philosophic and Platonic John Smith (1618-1652), whose Select