Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England, Vol. 5: With Specimens of the Principal Writers
Tax Revolution, brought on by some of the same causes that had given birth to the Commonwealth, and restoring something of the same spirit and condition of things, came like another nightfall upon our higher litera ture, putting out the light of poetry in the land still more effectually than even that previous triumph of the popular principle. Up to this date English literature had grown and ?ourished chie?y in the sunshine of court protection and favour the public appreciation and sympathy were not yet suficiently extended to afford it the necessary warmth and shelter. Its spirit, consequently, md a?'ec tions were in the main courtly; it drooped and withered when the encouragement of the court was withdrawn, from the deprivation both of its customary support and sustenance and of its chief inspiration. And, if the decay of this kind of light at the Revolution was, as we have said, still more complete than that which followed upon the setting up of the Commonwealth, the difference seems to have been mainly owing to there having been less of it to extinguish at the one epoch than at the other. At the Revolution the impulse given by the great p00 of the age of Elizabeth and James was yet operating.
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