The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new school, Jonson’s by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne’s by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary revolution imperative.  The school of Donne—­the “fantastics” as they have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets), produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat exotic religiousness of Crashaw.  In the hands of Cowley the use of far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died.  To the followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in the intenser loyalty of troubled times.  The most finished of them is perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick.  At the end of them came Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.

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The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human knowledge.  The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation which was revolutionizing science and philosophy.  For the first time the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research, and though Bacon in his Novum Organum adhered to the older mode its disappearance was rapid.  English was proving itself too flexible an instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected.  It was applied too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and homely Latimer ever dreamed of.  The preachers, though their golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here.  The men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like way outside our province.  For the purpose of the literary student the achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate men or books—­in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne.