Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his
boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till
1667. Of the older writers in prose, Selden alone remained; but as
Dryden grew to manhood, he had at hand, fresh from the printers, the
whole wealth of Commonwealth prose, still somewhat clumsy with Latinism
or tainted with Euphuism, but working steadily toward that simple
strength and graceful fluency with which he was himself to mark the
beginning of modern English prose.

Clarendon, with his magnificently involved style, began his famous
_History of the Great Rebellion_ in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes
published the _Leviathan_, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter,
with his _Saints' Everlasting Rest_ sent a book of religious consolation
into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of
a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his _Religio
Medici_; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his
_Compleat Angler_ how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller,
born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town,
Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his _Holy and Profane State_, a collection
of brief and brisk character sketches, which come nearer modern prose
than anything of that time; while for inspired thought and purity of
diction the _Holy Living_, 1650, and the _Holy Dying_, 1651, of Jeremy
Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preeminent in the prose of the
Commonwealth.

But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of
Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his
own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him
with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure
in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for