Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/27

 INTRODUCTION. XIX

historians and antiquaries. Speed, Archbishop Usher, the learned primate of Ireland, Sir Robert Cotton, and Sir Henry Spelman, flourished about this time. KnoUes pub- lished his history of the Turks in 1603, to whom Johnson, in one of his "Ramblers" (122), has awarded the first place among English historians, being borne out in his judgment by Hallam.* The illustrious Camden's " Brittannia " and "Annales Rerum Anglicarum regnante Elizabetha" had appeared early in the century, and the learned author had been long numbered with the dead. There was also the Latin historian and poet of Scotland, Buchanan, who had been the tutor of King James. Sir Walter Raleigh had occupied twelve weary years of imprisonment in writing his "History of the World," published in 1614, the most important of the works of that distinguished soldier and navigator. Bacon, the great philosopher, the able his- torian, the accomplished orator, who combined in himself most of the varied powers of his noted contemporaries, had been degraded from the exalted post of Lord Chan- cellor. Shorn of his honors, after devoting the leisure which his retirement afforded to his favorite studies, he died on the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, a victim of the science he loved so tbndly.f

A recent English writer has remarked : " In one sense the reign of James is the most religious part of our his- tory ; for religion was then fashionable. The forms of state, the king's speeches, the debates in parliament, and the current literature, were filled with quotations from scripture and quaint allusions to sacred things." J Super-


 * Craik's English Literature. New York : 1S63. Vol. I. p. 619.

t Life pref. to " Essays." Boston : 1856. p. 37.

J Marsden's " Early Puritans." London: i860, p- 3^2.

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