The British nation a history / by George MWrong . on, writ-ing in tlie same period, express,each in his own way, the deepreligious spirit that marked theseventeenth century. JeremyTaylor and Richard Baxter,also contemporaries, deal withsimilar high themes. But inthat age not all who could write were pondering the waysof God. The age of Charles II was marked by reactionagainst Puritan ideals, and the court circle, though pol-ished, was cynical and dissolute. The drama, discouragedunder the Puritan regime^ revived,but the old plays of the age ofShakespeare no longer appealedto the prevailing tas
The British nation a history / by George MWrong . on, writ-ing in tlie same period, express,each in his own way, the deepreligious spirit that marked theseventeenth century. JeremyTaylor and Richard Baxter,also contemporaries, deal withsimilar high themes. But inthat age not all who could write were pondering the waysof God. The age of Charles II was marked by reactionagainst Puritan ideals, and the court circle, though pol-ished, was cynical and dissolute. The drama, discouragedunder the Puritan regime^ revived,but the old plays of the age ofShakespeare no longer appealedto the prevailing taste ; not trag-edy, but comedy, flourished, andit was on the French model, de-picting scenes from higher societyin its worst phases. Fortunatelyreaction was confined to the ujiperclasses. The old Puritan spiritstill survived: Miltons eliief workwas done after the Restoration,and Bunyans devout allegory con-tains a vivid picture of middle-class life at the time. In the circle of court writers Dry-dens is the chief name, lie wrote plays, but he did. .TuiiN Drvden (1631-1700). SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 491 more: he laid the foundation for the rational, concise,and effective poetry that remained the fashion until thedeath of Pope in the next century, and he developed aflexible style in English prose that is in striking contrastwith the stately and poetical periods of earlier this perfection of form, both the poefryand prose of Drydeu are commonplace. But the circleof readers was much wider than ever before. We findin the time of Charles II the first great booksellers:Jacob Tonson, Drydens publisher, was able to pay largesums to authors, though thechief method of sale wasthrough subscriptions re-ceived before the first half of the eight-eenth century we find theclimax of the earlier literarymovement. Pope was a closeimitator of Drydeu; and hispoetry, with little imagina-tion or emotion, but highlyfinished, appealed to the re-fined and c
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