The most eminent prose writers of this period were Sir Walter Raleigh,
Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, John Bunyan, Bishop Hooker, Jeremy
Taylor, John Locke, Hobbes, Dean Swift, Defoe, and Addison; the chief
poets, Shakespeare and Jonson (mentioned under the preceding period),
Milton, Dryden, Pope, Butler, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with a class
of writers known as the "Comic Dramatists of the Restoration," whose
works, though not lacking in genius, exhibit many of the worst
features of the licentious age in which they were produced. Three
other great writers were born in the latter part of this period,--
Fielding, the novelist, Hume, the historian, and Butler,[1] the ablest
thinker of his time in the English Church,--but their productions
belong to the time of the Georges.
[1] Bishop Butler, author of "The Analogy of Religion" (1736), a work
which gained for him the title of "The Bacon of Theology."