Silesius (of whom the next volume speaks) and Friederich von Spee (1591-1635), and the religious sonnets of Andreas Gryphius. But the best has the simplicity and strength of folk-song. The greatest of these hymn-writers is the author of "Befiehl du deine Wege" and "Nun ruhen alle Wälder," Paul Gerhardt (1607-76), who also has been included in the subsequent volume of this series. Drama. The dramatic preparation of the sixteenth century, which has been described in a previous volume,1 produced no adequate result in the seventeenth. No Shakespeare arose to harmonise the popular and learned elements in a drama vital and artistic. The school Latin drama of the preceding century remained Germany's greatest achievement in drama till the appearance of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller. For a Shakespeare or a Corneille, Germany produced only an Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664). Gryphius. A native of Glogau, in Silesia, Gryphius had a troubled early life, in which he made himself master of all the languages which the confusion of the Thirty Years' War brought together in Germany, as well as composing the usual epic poem. A patron gave him the means of proceeding to Leyden to study, where he brought out two books of sonnets, Son- und Feyrtags Sonnete (1639), accomplished in form, and full of passionate religious zeal. He visited Italy and many parts of Germany, and died at his native town in 1664. 1 Early Renaissance, cc. 5 and 6. Gryphius' plays show the influence of the tragedies of Seneca and Vondel, and of the English plays which had already affected the ruder work of Jacob Ayrer (1595-1605), who "grafted the English dramatic style" (with its abundance of action and striking situations) "on to the style of Hans Sachs." Gryphius' tragedies Leo Arminius, Catharina von Georgien, Ermordete Majestät oder Carolus Stuardus, &c., Cardenio und Celinde, Gross-muttiger Rechts-Gelehrterbreathe the same Christian spirit as Vondel's (three are, like so many of the Dutch poet's, martyr-plays), but Gryphius' are in the more melodramatic Senecan style, which Vondel outgrew as he became familiar with Greek tragedy. They are full of ghost scenes, atrocities, and bombast. The Cardenio und Celinde, an Italian novella tragedy, is written in a simpler and more effective style. But Gryphius' best plays are his two comedies, Peter Squenz and Horribilicribrifax. The first deals with the comic episodes, the acting of Bottom and his friends, in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the second is more a comedy of humours-the bragging soldier, the pedant, and the Jew. Both are written in prose. In Friedrich von Logau (1605-1655) the early seventeenth century produced a satirical epigrammatist who was scantly appreciated in his lifetime. In 1638 he published Erstes Hundert Teutscher Reimen - Sprüche, and, in 1654, Salomons von Golaw Deutscher Sinn - Gedichte Drey Tausend. They were little noticed till republished in 1759. Logau was a patriot, and was not a great Satire. believer in Opitz's rules. He expresses bitterly his sense of the subservience of Germany in literary and other fashions-her unhappy lot at this period, when Spain and France, England and Holland, had such rich and such national literatures "Wer nicht Französisch kann, The mass of artificial and occasional verse produced by the admirers of Opitz is consigned to oblivion. To the rich harvest of Renaissance poetry-especially rich in lyric and drama-Germany's contribution is practically limited to some drama not of the first order, some graceful courtly song, epigrams, and some passionate and simple hymns. CHAPTER IX. CONCLUSION. FORCES AT WORK-END OF THE RENAISSANCE-THE COUNTER REFORMATION-RATIONALISM AND CLASSICISM. ON no period in the history of European literature is it more difficult to generalise with profit than that which has been briefly reviewed in the Introduction. foregoing chapters. Since human thinking began, it has been said, there has been no greater revolution in thought than that which was effected, in men's conception of the world and its laws, in the course of the seventeenth century. To give any complete account of that revolution, and of the eddies which retarded, obscured, or advanced its progress, is beyond the scope of the present work. Indeed, to give a sketch of the intellectual activity, in all its aspects, of even the first sixty years of the century, such as Hallam attempted in his Introduction, would require another volume as large as the present, the subject of which is exclusively literature conceived as an art. Philosophers, theologians, historians, and men of science have been included only in so far as they were also distinctly and admittedly men of letters. It is therefore on one or two of the larger aspects of the literature of the period alone that it is necessary in closing to dwell briefly, mainly with a view to defining as clearly as possible the relation of the period under consideration to those which precede and follow. End of the In certain aspects the literature of the early seventeenth century is a continuation of the literature of the Renaissance, the present volume a Renaissance. third chapter in the history whose first and second chapters are contained in Professor Saintsbury's Earlier Renaissance and Mr Hannay's Later Renaissance. This is notably the case as regards Holland and Germany, where the early years of the seventeenth century correspond, in the most important respects, to the last half of the sixteenth in France and England; although, of course, the very fact that the Renaissance movement came late in these countries was not without consequences for the literature which that movement produced. It came from the beginning under the influence of the religious agitations of the century. Lyrical Poetry. It is especially in lyrical and dramatic poetry that the impulse of the Renaissance is still traceable in wellnigh all the literatures touched on here. The lyrical poetry of the Renaissance, that wonderful product, stimulated in its growth from Italy, but in all the countries north of the Alps striking a deeper root into the health-giving soil of |