Godfrey, E: Social Life Under the Stuarts (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Social Life Under the Stuarts

For in these matters still more than on its domestic side the period has a singular completeness in itself, separated by rapid growth and development from the Elizabethan age, by a chasm from the era of the Restora tion. Whether we look at it from the side of the arts, of science, or of religion, the contrast is sharp both to what went before and to what followed. To take music: those years saw concerted music emerge from the disconnected crowd of instruments of the lute or mandoline order, and crystallise into the balanced symmetry of violin, viola, and 'cello, with wood-wind, brass, and percussion, forming the band much as we have it now; they saw, moreover, the rise of a school of church music, which is perhaps one of the best things that England has to boast of in that kind, which attained its ripened perfection on the eve of the war, and was by that war and its consequences absolutely cut off. Other important developments followed later, but they were on distinctly different lines, and owed much more to foreign in¿uences, both German and Italian.

In art we see a school of portrait-painting of singular completeness, dying with Vandyck, whose successors of the Restoration belonged to a totally different order, both by handling and technique, and by the manner in which they envisaged their sitters with these latter our later school of painters, such as Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney, have far more affinity than they have with Vandyck or Janssen. Miniature painting too had its rise, ceasing to be the mere oil-painting in little which it was in the preceding century, and working its way through gouache on vellum to ivory. The enthusiasm for the collection of works of art, Greek marbles, Italian, Spanish, or Flemish paintings, which has enriched England with so many masterpieces, was at its zenith under Eliza beth men had hardly realised its fascination, and later the war and the subsequent Puritan ascendancy checked it for many years.

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