The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 5. The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
That book, which we all call immortal, though it is gradually sinking into the limbo whither much of seventeenth century prose, for all save scholars, has gone before, is, in many respects, “modern” in tone; and yet it is not so modern as Jeremy Taylor, because it has, or seems to have, much less art, as it certainly has much less glow. It is serious and direct; it is eloquent, after a simple, godly and appealing sort. Yet, after all, it is the matter not the manner which gives the book its place in English literature. There is no special thing in which you can say that Baxter influenced other writers; there is no individual influence on himself which you can trace from writers who preceded him. He would not have written as he did if Hooker had not written before him; but, then, that is true of the whole succession of post-Elizabethan prose.