Excerpt from Seventeenth-Century Studies: A Contribution to the History of English Poetry In writing this book my object has been to do for some of the rank and file of seventeenth-century literature what modern criticism has done, on a much larger scale, for Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Those great figures have been taken out of their surroundings, and have been discussed upon their own merits, biographically, aesthetically, historically. But in scarcely any instances, and in these on no consistent plan, has this been done for the smaller writers. Yet it is in these less monumental figures that the progress of literary history is most clearly to be marked, and it has seemed to me not undesirable that the truth which we try to tell definitely and exhaustively in a set of volumes about Milton or Dryden, should be told as definitely in a single chapter about Cowley or Otway. I have therefore tried to make each of the ensuing studies an exhaustive critical biography in miniature, yet each in some way connected with that which precedes it, and all treated on the same relative scale. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."