with greediness." The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct,
actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition.
As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said
to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease
affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign
of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief
in the impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect,
or that the latter draws greatness from the inspiration of the former.
There was a time in the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded,
"there was no open vision". It can be said, emphatically,
that in the time of Charles II. there was no open vision.
And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark age, which was afflicted
with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there had never been an age
so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth (which designation
I would apply to the period of fifty years or more, from 1575 to 1625,
or somewhat later), in which the human faculties, in their whole range,
both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion
as they had never before reached in the history of the world, --
that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher,
Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list
of great names might be continued), -- that great age, I say,
was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous
in comparison with their own. But beneath all, still lay
the restorative elements of the English character, which were to
reassert themselves and usher in a new era of literary productiveness,
the greatest since the Elizabethan age, and embodying
the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained.
We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life,
but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness