Excerpt from The Religious Tendency in the English Literary Criticism of the Seventeenth Century England was one of the last countries to feel the influ ence of the Renaissance and English literary criticism was slow in developing. As the revolutionary changes in England were af fected gradually and with little foreign influence, so English literary criticism was backward, and in its early history was singularly free from the influence of foreign criticism with its variety and abundance. It had no wealth of English tradition, and in fact little material upon which to work or exercise itself. 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.