Milton’s Ode on the Nativity
|
1630-1640.  King rules without |
Parliament.  Puritan migration |
to New England | 1630-1633.  Herbert’s poems
|
| 1632-1637.  Milton’s Horton poems
|
1640.  Long Parliament |
|
1642.  Civil War begins | 1642.  Browne’s Religio Medici
|
1643.  Scotch Covenant |
|
1643.  Press censorship | 1644.  Milton’s Areopagitica
|
1645.  Battle of Naseby; |
triumph of Puritans |
|
1649.  Execution of Charles I. |
Cavalier migration to Virginia |
|
1649-1660.  Commonwealth | 1649.  Milton’s Tenure of Kings
|
| 1650.  Baxter’s Saints’ Rest.
| Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living
|
| 1651.  Hobbes’s Leviathan
|
1653-1658.  Cromwell, Protector | 1653.  Walton’s Complete Angler
|
1658-1660.  Richard Cromwell |
|
1660.  Restoration of Charles II | 1663-1694.  Dryden’s dramas
| (next chapter)
|
| 1666.  Bunyan’s Grace Abounding
|
| 1667.  Paradise Lost
|
| 1674.  Death of Milton
|
| 1678.  Pilgrim’s Progress published
| (written earlier)
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* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII

PERIOD OF THE RESTORATION (1660-1700)

THE AGE OF FRENCH INFLUENCE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD.  It seems a curious contradiction, at first glance, to place the return of Charles II at the beginning of modern England, as our historians are wont to do; for there was never a time when the progress of liberty, which history records, was more plainly turned backwards.  The Puritan regime had been too severe; it had repressed too many natural pleasures.  Now, released from restraint, society abandoned the decencies of life and the reverence for law itself, and plunged into excesses more unnatural than had been the restraints of Puritanism.  The inevitable effect of excess is disease, and for almost an entire generation following the Restoration, in 1660, England lay sick of a fever.  Socially, politically, morally, London suggests an Italian city in the days of the Medici; and its literature, especially its drama, often seems more like the delirium of illness than the expression of a healthy mind.  But even a fever has its advantages.  Whatever impurity is in the blood “is burnt and purged away,” and a man rises from fever with a new strength and a new idea of the value of life, like King Hezekiah, who after his sickness and fear of death resolved to “go softly” all his days.  The Restoration was the great crisis in English history; and that England lived through it was due solely to the strength and excellence of that Puritanism which she thought she had flung to the winds when she welcomed back