In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there are a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes.  Even that quaintness of thought which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its attraction for a nice literary palate.  Prose became now of greater relative importance than ever before.  Almost every distinguished writer lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and political controversy of the time.  There were famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in natural science—­which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon’s writings—­among whom may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist; and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood.  These are outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific attitude of mind.  The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn.  The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity.  Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 1646.  The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this Anatomy, in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections.  The work is a mosaic of quotations.  All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug.  Lawrence Sterne helped himself freely to Burton’s treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that the Anatomy was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.

The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to refute were such as these:  That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes’s army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon’s brazen head, etc.  Another book in which great learning