n to ruggedness. Like
Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became
impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in
masses, left rough places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to
express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail. It
was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural
over decorative methods, to give up rime for blank verse. His latest
poem, _Samson Agonistes_, a metrical study of the highest interest.

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. Macmillan.

2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F. D. Myers. (Parchment
Series.)

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3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald.

4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides.

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.

7. Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler.

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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 understanding. The serious,
exalted mood of the Civil War and the 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 B