Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the popular cause.  Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration, was a good Republican, and wrote a fine Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.  There is also a rare imaginative quality in his Song of the Exiles in Bermuda, Thoughts in a Garden, and The Girl Describes her Fawn.  George Wither, who was imprisoned for his satires, also took the side of the Parliament, but there is little that is distinctively Puritan in his poetry.

* * * * *

1.  Milton’s Poetical Works.  Edited by David Masson.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1882. 3 vols.

2.  Selections from Milton’s Prose.  Edited by F.D.  Myers.  New York:  D. Appleton & Co., 1883. (Parchment Series.)

3.  England’s Antiphon.  By George Macdonald.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1868.

4.  Robert Herrick’s Hesperides.  London:  George Routledge & Sons, 1885. (Morley’s Universal Library).

5.  Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia.  Edited by Willis Bund.  Sampson Low & Co., 1873.

6.  Thomas Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields, 1863.

7.  Walton’s Complete Angler.  Edited by Sir Harris Nicolas.  London:  Chatto & Windus, 1875.

CHAPTER V.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE.

1660-1744.

The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination to wit and the understanding.  The serious, exalted mood of the civil war and Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion.  There followed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle.  The characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts.  The age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry.  The Royal Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662.  There were able divines in the pulpit and at the universities—­Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others:  scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet; scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke.  But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray.