The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
XVI. The Advent of Modern Thought in Popular Literature.
§ 14. Letter writing.
| This friendly interest in the peculiarities of character increased the abhorrence with which men viewed the revilings 70 of the age of the civil war. The age was bent on mutual respect and consideration. So they turned to the study of letter writing to cultivate a more suave spirit of intercourse. Davies 71 describes “the gentler art” as “the cement of all society, the foundation and Superstructure of all Friendship and conversation.” It is true that epistolary correspondence had been recognised as a literary type since the renascence had brought men into touch with Cicero, Seneca and Guevara, and that, as early as 1586, Angell Day had produced a manual of letter writing, 72 while other writers, including Nicholas Breton 73 and Joseph Hall, 74 had appealed in this form to the public; but, then, the art was being cultivated as a literary experiment. The new generation were more interested in courtesy and the expression of mutual respect. For them, letter writing was a civilising influence. So they looked for their models, not among the ancients, but at the French court, where a period of peace and concentrated government had developed a more refined and intellectual ideal of social life. Thus, writers who might, thirty years earlier, have revived and adapted ancient styles of literature, now edited and translated the letters of Balzac, de la Serre and Voiture, or cast their tractates into an epistolary form in which the courtesies of this type of literature were scrupulously observed, as in Metamorphosis Anglorum (1660), addressed to Don Lewis de Haro. |
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