English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century

This volume deals with what is often called the age of Dryden. Dryden, as the greatest poet and critic of the Restoration period and one of its leading dramatists, has been given fuller treatment here than any other writer. But this was also the age of Bunyan, of Halifax and Locke, of Boyle and Newton. And the period is unusually rich in writers just short of the highest rank--the dramatists Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, Otway, Lee, and Congreve; the preachers Barrow, South, and Tillotson; the historians Clarendon and Burnet; Samuel Butler, Charles Cotton and Rochester among the poets; and miscellaneous writers like Evelyn and Pepys, Aubrey, Cowley and Sir William Temple. The three longest chapters--two on drama and one on religion--will show where the main emphasis of this curiously divided period really fell; but due weight is given to the historians and biographers, the essayists and journalists, the men of science, the poets, the politicians, the writers of fiction, and lastly--in this critical and controversial age--the critics.