Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/399

Rh something of the same kind was done for Dutch prose by the pedantic, but dignified and harmonious, work of Hooft.

Yet even in this period the simpler, directer prose of Dryden and Swift is heralded; and, as might be expected, it is among those in whom the spirit of reason, of the Aufklärung, is at work. The prose of the moderate divines, Hales and Chillingworth, is comparatively simple and straightforward, though Taylor is still diffuse and ambiguous; and Hobbes's style, in everything but ease and grace, is as modern as Dryden's—precise, orderly, and regular in construction.

These are the chief forces at work in this period, a period to which the title of transitional might be applied quite as fittingly as to the fifteenth century. But the transition is not marked by the slow decay of an old tradition and the gradual birth of a new,—rather by the confused conflict of great and active forces. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, all are potent and shaping influences. Even the prophetic vision of a Bacon could hardly have descried at the opening of the century how completely all these would yield place before it closed to the spirit of rationalist inquiry.