to the English (Established) Church, now became known as Dissenters.

The men of the Restoration, then, deliberately repudiated some of the chief
forces which seem to a romantic age to make life significant. As a natural
corollary they concentrated their interest on the sphere of the practical
and the actual. In science, particularly, they continued with marked
success the work of Bacon and his followers. Very shortly after the
Restoration the Royal Society was founded for the promotion of research and
scientific knowledge, and it was during this period that Sir Isaac Newton
(a man in every respect admirable) made his vastly important discoveries in
physics, mathematics, and astronomy.

In literature, both prose and verse, the rationalistic and practical spirit
showed itself in the enthroning above everything else of the principles of
utility and common sense in substance and straightforward directness in
style. The imaginative treatment of the spiritual life, as in 'Paradise
Lost' or 'The Faerie Queene,' or the impassioned exaltation of imaginative
beauty, as in much Elizabethan poetry, seemed to the typical men of the
Restoration unsubstantial and meaningless, and they had no ambition to
attempt flights in those realms. In anything beyond the tangible affairs of
visible life, indeed, they had little real belief, and they preferred that
literature should restrain itself within the safe limits of the known and
the demonstrable. Hence the characteristic Restoration verse is satire of a
prosaic sort which scarcely belongs to poetry at all. More fortunate
results of the prevailing spirit were the gradual abandonment of the
conceits and irregularities of the 'metaphysical' poets, and, most
important, the perfecting of the highly regular rimed pentameter couplet,
the one great formal achievement of the time in verse. In prose style the
same tendencies resulted in a distinct advance. Thitherto English prose had
seldom attained to thorough conciseness and order; it had generally been