In any time or place literature is often influenced by concepts such as politics, society, philosophy, and in the true Puritan and Anglican fashion, spirituality and the Bible. It is this influence which Edward Dowden has cleverly critiqued. In his foreword, he writes, "Literature, however, and especially what is most valuable in the seventeenth-century cannot be studied without reference to the history of religion." Which is why, although the seventeenth-century...