his waggon to a star; whether a star of bale or benison remained to be proved.

Here was something to counterbalance the inwardness of the Puritan spirit, something to maintain a just equipoise of character. And if in taking the Bible as their guide they often read into it their own meanings, often gave it passionate misinterpretations, often applied to modern life what was of transitory significance, still in the Bible they had a veritable manual of moral wisdom and high common sense. It has been truly said that from the Bible the noblest minds among the Puritans imbibed not merely the great enthusiasm which it expresses, but also the strong practical sagacity and broad right-mindedness of which it is the emphatic teacher.1 The passion for righteousness could ally itself with a spirit of prudent and patient opportunism. "If ever there was a man who suffered fools gladly, who sought to influence and persuade, and who was ready to get something tolerable done by consent rather than get something better done by forcing it on unwilling minds, that man was Cromwell."2

We have seen some of the formative influences from which a Puritan literature might arise. But we must bear in mind the fact that Puritanism was only for a short time triumphant. Except for a few years, Puritanism was militant or Puritanism was depressed. We can only conjecture whether a great literature would have developed on a Puritan basis if the

1 J. L. Sanford, "Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion," P. 81.

2 S. R. Gardiner, "Cromwell's Place in History," p. 48.

Commonwealth had existed even for one entire generation; we can only surmise on the question whether righteousness would have flowered in beauty and severity have worn the garments of joy. Mantegna's "Triumph of Cæsar" and Raphael's cartoons (which Charles II. was ready to sell) were saved for the nation by Cromwell. Two organs stood in the great hall at Hampton Court, and a pupil of Orlando Gibbons was the Protector's organist. At the wedding-feast of the Protector's daughter Frances forty-eight violins discoursed excellent music, and the company frolicked and danced until five o'clock of the November morning. For his daughter Mary's marriage Andrew Marvell furnished songs, a pastoral in which Oliver was introduced as Menalcas, and a dialogue between Endymion and Cynthia, representing the bridegroom and the bride. Modest as were Cromwell's ways of private living, in State ceremonial, as Protector of England, he could be magnificent. Although Mrs Mary Netheway implored that the bronze statues of Venus and Cleopatra and the marble statues of Adonis and Apollo in the garden at Hampton Court, "monsters which are set up in Privy Gardens," might be demolished, there the monsters remained. But the strife of parties during the Commonwealth made it inevitable that the graver mind of England should in the main occupy itself with practical work of immediate importance. Theological folios and political pamphlets may now slumber on

1 See Mr Frith's article, "The Court of Cromwell," in the Cornhill Magazine, Sept. 1897; and Mr St Loe Strachey's “From Grave to Gay," Pp. 152, 153,

dusty shelves, but some of these in their day were instinct with fire; they were living forces helping to form character, to regulate conduct, to shape public action. If few of them deserve the name of literature, they yet stirred the soil from which a literature might have sprung. And certain works remain to us which

serve as more than an indication of the possibilities of a Puritan literature. We have the impassioned exhortations of "The Saints' Rest"; we have the epic of seventeenth-century theology-the poems of the loss of Paradise by man and its recovery by a greater Man; we have the Puritan drama of God's afflicted champion obtaining victory by obedience unto death; we have the story, ardent, tender, humorous, of the Pilgrims' wayfaring from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. And what else in the literature of the period can outweigh these gifts of Puritan passion and Puritan faith?

V

If

In the Puritan inwardness of spirit, in its vivid realisation of the unseen, if only these could find a suitable medium of representation and vehicle of expression, lay important possibilities for literature. Hellenism served to broaden, Hebraism served to deepen the national consciousness of England. The inward drama of the spiritual life became more tragically earnest; its lyrical cries of hope and fear, of anguish and joy, became more poignant. God and the soul were the chief actors in the drama, but for the Puritan imagination a world of magic lay around the human

soul-blessed angels, demons of the pit, special interpositions of Providence, miraculous words of Scripture, preternatural voices echoing in the heart. In the introspective habit which scrutinised and searched the soul for intimations of loss or gain there were grave dangers; it might pass into a diseased fascination; but it might also be a great discipline; it might discover a world of marvellous phenomena hidden from those accustomed only to turn the eye outward on the world of action.

Again, in the doctrine of Puritanism was a body of inspiring ideas, an inspiring conception of the life of man, which humbled and at the same time exalted. He was the creature of a passing moment, yet a spirit moving in a world at present only realised in part and formed for eternity. Already his destiny was sealed, yet appalling mystery-free and responsible, he became his own doomsman. As this conception was made real and living, human existence-the existence even of the meanest child of earth-grew in" dignity, since to it belonged the most awful, the most blessed issues. Our threescore years and ten-an atom in eternity acquired a grandeur as the moment of a solemn test and trial. Everything that seems to careless eyes trivial and accidental was in truth part of a divine order; but this order included the sudden interventions of the law-maker. Man, mysteriously endowed with free will, was no estray wandering in a realm of chance; rather was he a subject, loyal or disloyal, of a stern and beneficent Ruler. He had his appointed station in a vast warfare, his appointed place

in a mighty scheme. Fallen, indeed, he was, bound under sin by the transgression of our first parents, condemned by the law, a defaulter under the covenant of works; but a door of escape, a radiant avenue of hope, had been opened under a covenant of grace. Through disobedience Adam fell through perfect obedience to the divine will a way of salvation had been wrought out. In these ideas, not all peculiar to Puritanism, but realised by the Puritan temper with peculiar intensity, Milton found the themes for his epic of the Fall and his epic of Redemption. They were no mere part of a theological system; they entered profoundly into life and into literature.

But obedience and loyalty to the divine will does not consist solely in passive submission; they breathe forth or flame forth in an active co-operancy with that will. One who has himself become a part of the heavenly order in the world cannot but seek to extend that order into regions not yet reclaimed. And this he may strive to do in either of two ways-by appeals to the individual souls of men, or by action in the social and political sphere. Hence arose a literature of passionate exhortation, the pleadings of the preachers; hence also arose the zeal and energy of public reform, which in literature found expression in such works as the prose writings of Milton. Of the hortatory literature, in which meditation passes naturally into appeal, "The Saints' Rest" is a conspicuous example. It was written, as Baxter himself tells us, for his own use, in the time of his languishment, when God took him from all public employment. He was ill, and alone in the country,