appear in quick succession. Chapman's magnificent version of Homer
was delighting Cavalier and Puritan alike. "Plutarch's Lives,"
were translated by Sir Thomas North and his book was "a household
book for the whole of the seventeenth century." Montaigne's Essays
had been "done into English" by John Florio, and to some of them
at least Thomas Dudley was not likely to take exception. Poets and
players had, however, come to be classed together and with some
reason, both alike antagonizing the Puritan, but the poets of the
reign of James were far more simple and natural in style than
those of the age of Elizabeth, and thus, more likely to be read in
Puritan families. Their numbers may be gauged by their present
classification into "pastoral, satirical, theological, metaphysical
and humorous," but only two of them were in entire sympathy
with the Puritan spirit, or could be read without serious shock
to belief and scruples.

For the sake of her own future work, deeper drinking at these
springs was essential, and in rejecting them, Anne Dudley lost the
influence that must have moulded her own verse into much more
agreeable form for the reader of to-day, though it would probably
have weakened her power in her own day. The poets she knew best
hindered rather than helped development. Wither and Quarles, both
deeply Calvinistic, the former becoming afterward one of
Cromwell's major-generals, were popular not only then but long
afterward, and Quarles' "Emblems", which appeared in 1635, found
their way to New England and helped to make sad thought still more
dreary. Historians and antiquaries were at work. Sir Walter
Raleigh's "History of the World," must have given little Anne her
first suggestion of life outside of England, while Buchanan, the
tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and poet of