The passions, actions, sentiments,
whose character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are
those of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to
question the right of that society to exist than to criticise the divine
ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they were, not
with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is shaped or
twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its
abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the first half
of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest was
rather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thought
and principle and conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in
which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne,
out most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathing-room, for a
time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious speculation, but soon
descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science. Jeremy
Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's rival,
compels his clipped fancy to the conventual discipline of prose, (Maid
Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence.
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