Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/767

 Struggle in England between King and Parliament 66 1 These theories seem strange and very unreasonable to us, but The " divine James was only trying to justify the powers which the Tudor k^gs"^ monarchs had actually exercised and which the kings of France enjoyed down to the French Revolution of 1789. According to the theory of '' the divine right of kings " it had pleased God to appoint the monarch the father of his people. People must obey him as they would God and ask no questions. The king was responsible to God alone, to whom he owed his powers, not to Parliament or the nation (see below, p. 682). It is unnecessary to follow the troubles between James I and Parliament, for his reign only forms the preliminary to the fatal experiences of his son Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625. The writers of James's reign constituted its chief glory. They Great writers outshone those of any other European country. Shakespeare is reign"^^'^ generally admitted to be the greatest dramatist that the world Shakespeare has produced. While he wrote many of his plays before the death of Elizabeth, some of his finest — Othello, King Lear, and The Te7npest, for example — belong to the time of James I. During the same period Francis Bacon (see above, p. 656) was Francis writing his Advancement of Learning, which he dedicated to ^*^°" James I in 1605 and in which he urged that men should cease to rely upon the old textbooks, like Aristotle, and turn to a careful examination of animals, plants, and chemicals, with a view of learning about them and using the knowledge thus gained to improve the condition of mankind. Bacon's ability to write English is equal to that of Shakespeare, but he chose to write prose, not verse. It was in James's reign that the King James authorized English translation of the Bible was made which JhrSble is still used in all countries where English is spoken. An English physician of this period, William Harvey, exam- William ined the workings of the human body more carefully than any ^"^^^ previous investigator and made the great discovery of the man- ner in which the blood circulates from the heart through the arteries and capillaries and back through the veins — a matter which had previously been entirely misunderstood.