The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 9. The growth of literary characterisation and “appreciation”
The influence of Hobbes’s political philosophy on Restoration thought and conduct is well known; his outlook on life, and, more especially, the psychology by which it is explained, were scarcely less influential in the domain of letters. Tempered and refined by the social and literary influences proceeding from France, they became, in the hands of younger men (not least of all in Cowley’s Odes), instruments of power. No member of this group accepts an absolute standard of taste; they do not yield a complete subservience to classical authority or to the pseudo-classical rules; the rationalistic temper has not, as yet, flooded criticism to the exclusion of all imaginative elements. They logically connect the critical activity of the first and the second Caroline periods; and Dryden begins his work at the point where D’Avenant and Cowley leave off.