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 to be systematised. Independent inquiry readily sought an outlet in studies which at first wore the look of being unconnected with dogma; and, in spite of Bacon's imaginative style, the disciples of experience began to separate science from literature as if they possessed no bond in that imaginative element without which experience is a dead thing. Literature, too, just now becoming the toy of courts, without sorrow surrendered to science a study of Nature which would not only have limited the freedom of romance, but bred dissatisfaction with the scenic models of Theocritus and Vergil. It was through classical spectacles that the culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preferred to see Nature; and it was just in their sentiments of Nature that classical literatures, as already explained, were weakest. Moreover, such sentiments of nature as classical literature had possessed were likely to be gravely misinterpreted by Christian imitators. The pastoral elegy of Modern Europe is a striking evidence of this misinterpretation. The essence of the Greek pastoral elegy is the contrast of man's individual life with Nature's apparent eternity—a melancholy sentiment becoming the lips of a modern materialist, but in the author of Lycidas, the poetic champion of a faith before which the material universe is but as dust and ashes compared with the soul of the veriest wretch who wears the form of man, almost grotesquely out of place. Why should Nature lament the escape of a divinity greater than herself from its clay prison? The Greek chorus in the social life of the Hebrews speaking the Puritanism of England in Samson Agonistes is not a stranger union of incongruities than the poet of individual immortality repeating the materialism of the Greek in lamentations for Edward King. Plainly the individualism of the sixteenth and seventeenth