in great measure by the religious and political history of the time, which it seems to me impossible to describe by any single term, be it disintegration with Mr Barrett Wendell, or decadence with Mr Gosse. Elizabethan literature was never integral, notwithstanding Spenser's effort at reconciliation; and decadence seems a term hardly applicable to a period which opens with Shakespeare and Bacon, and closes with Locke and Milton. For Holland, the period is that of the rapid ripening—to be followed by a too rapid decay—of a literature inspired, as English had been earlier, by admiration of Italy and France as well as the Classics, but thoroughly national in all its essential features. In Germany, a similar movement is too early checked by "inauspicious stars." I have tried to outline these different movements, but to bring them under any single expression of real value is beyond my philosophic capacity.
P.S.—The dates in brackets appended to the names of works are those of first publication, except in the case of Corneille's plays, when they are those of performance as given by Marty-Laveaux. Bacon's Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church, though written probably in 1589, when the Martin-Marprelate controversy was at its height, was first issued, as a pamphlet, in 1640, when the quarrel was renewed.
- Aberdeen, May 10, 1906.
