From this sixty-one years of prolific writing, in which no less than two hundred and thirty authors gathered their poems together and published them, to say nothing of all the scattered writings, twelve volumes have come down to us with a large measure of fame. Only the last seven call for our reading; but two of them, Shakspeare and Bacon, are among the very most important books on the first shelf of the world's library.
=The Post-Shakspearian Age= is divided into four times, or periods,--the Time of Milton; the Time of Dryden; the Time of Pope; and the Time of the Novelists, Historians, and Scientists.
THE TIME OF MILTON, from 1620 to 1674, was contemporary with the Golden Age of literature in France. The great English books of this time were (1) _Chapman's Translation of Homer_, which is superseded by Pope's. (2) _Hobbes's Leviathan_, a discourse on government. Hobbes taught that government exists for the people, and rests not on the divine right of kings, but on a compact or agreement of all the citizens to give up a portion of their liberties in order by social co-operation the better to secure the remainder. He is one of our greatest philosophers; but the general reader will find the substance of Hobbes's whole philosophy better put in Locke, Mill, and Herbert Spencer. (3) _Walton's Complete Angler_, the work of a retired merchant who combined a love of fishing with a poetic perception of the beauties of Nature. It will repay a glance. (4) _S. Butler's Hudibras_, a keen satire on the Puritans who went too far in their effort to compel all men to conform their lives to the Puritan standard of abstinence from worldly pleasures. In spite of its vulgarity, the book stands very high in the literature of humor. (5) _George Herbert's Poems_, many of which are as sweet and holy as a flower upon a grave, and are beloved by all spiritually minded people. (6) _Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying_, a book that in the strength of its claim upon us must rank close after the Bible, Shakspeare, and the Science of Physiology and Hygiene. (7) _Milton's Poems_, of which the "Paradise Lost" and "Comus," for their sublimity and beauty, rank next after Shakspeare in English poetry. Æschylus, Dante, and Milton are the three sublimest souls in history.