Taine opens Volume 2 not with a poet but with a crisis: the Reformation in England. His chapter on the Christian Renaissance immediately contrasts the decay of southern civilizations with the rise of Luther, then pivots to England's own religious upheaval. The table of contents reveals a structure built on opposition—Anglicans versus Puritans, Milton the combative prose writer versus Milton the poet, Restoration roisterers versus worldlings. Taine's method is comparative and judgmental: he measures Dryden against Shakespeare, finding the later playwright wanting in 'the frankness, severity, delicacy, and charm of the original invention.'

The excerpts show a critic who reads literature as symptom. A Cleopatra designed after Lady Castlemaine becomes evidence of an age that 'bleat[s] as in a sheepfold.' Taine's own voice is forceful, even theatrical, and his sentences often build to a verdict. Readers should expect a history that argues as much as it describes.

A Critic Who Takes Sides

Taine does not pretend to neutrality. His prose judges authors by their moral and aesthetic alignment with what he considers the spirit of their age. In the excerpt on Dryden, he dismisses All for Love as a reduction of Shakespeare's tragedy to 'a pastoral,' and complains that Dryden 'excuse[s] Antony, to praise Charles II indirectly.' The criticism is specific and personal: Dryden's Cleopatra is 'a silly, harmless household dove,' lacking the 'nobleness of virtue' or 'greatness of crime.' Taine's method is to hold up an earlier writer—Shakespeare, Milton—as a standard, then show how later writers fall short.

This approach gives the volume a dramatic arc. The Restoration, in Taine's telling, is a period of loss. Poets 'stray on the boundaries of two dramas,' neither fully Shakespearean nor fully Racinian. The reader is invited to watch Taine build his case through contrast and condemnation, always with an eye to the larger forces—race, moment, civilization—that he believes determine literary production.

The Reformation as Literary Watershed

The volume's first book, 'The Christian Renaissance,' treats the Reformation not as a theological event but as a literary and cultural one. Taine devotes sections to Luther, the Reformation in Germany and England, and then to the Anglicans and Puritans as distinct literary types. John Bunyan gets his own section, placed between the Puritans and Milton—a placement that suggests Taine sees Bunyan as the culmination of Puritan literary energy.

The excerpts do not reveal Taine's full argument about Bunyan, but the table of contents indicates that the Reformation is the lens through which he reads the seventeenth century. Milton, too, is introduced as a product of this religious ferment: his 'combative energy' and 'unhappy domestic life' are given sections before his poetry. Taine's interest is in the writer as a person shaped by historical forces, not in the work as an autonomous artifact. Readers should watch for how he connects biographical detail to literary output.

Restoration Drama Under the Microscope

The longest continuous excerpt in the provided material is Taine's critique of Restoration drama, focused on Dryden but ranging over Settle, Shadwell, Otway, and Lee. Taine's central claim is that the drama of this period is 'dead' because it tries to combine two incompatible modes: 'literary style blunted dramatic truth; dramatic truth marred literary style.' The result is work that is 'neither sufficiently vivid nor sufficiently well written.'

Taine supports this with specific charges: Dryden's The Tempest 'turned Eve and Miranda into courtesans'; Settle's The Empress of Morocco was so admired that courtiers learned it by heart, yet Taine implies this is evidence of bad taste. He also notes a structural problem: the audience itself was 'hesitating between two forms of thought,' neither fully Renaissance nor fully classical. This sociological explanation is typical of Taine's method, which seeks the cause of literary failure in the character of the age.

Race, Moment, and the Limits of Inference

Taine's famous triad—race, milieu, moment—is visible in the excerpts, though he does not use the terms explicitly. He writes of the English 'race' diverging from its own age, 'fettered at the outset by foreign imitation.' The Restoration audience, he argues, had 'no longer the freshness of feelings' of the Renaissance cavaliers, nor would they ever acquire the 'gentleness of manners' of the French court. They were caught between two civilizations, suited to neither.

This deterministic framework gives the volume a coherent argument, but it also means Taine's judgments are sweeping. Readers should note that the excerpts are incomplete: we see his critique of Dryden but not his treatment of Milton's poetry, which occupies a full chapter. The volume's 197,047 words allow for detailed analysis, but the provided material only hints at how Taine handles writers he admires. The closing sections of the book, which include the Restoration drama critique, suggest that Taine's narrative is one of decline from the Renaissance to the Classic Age.

Taine's History of English Literature is not a neutral reference work but a sustained argument about how literature expresses the spirit of an age. Readers will find his judgments provocative and his method illuminating, even when they disagree. The volume rewards those who read it as a performance of criticism rather than a catalogue of facts. Pay attention to Taine's transitions between sections: they reveal the causal links he sees between religious conflict, court culture, and literary form. The index and table of contents are essential tools for navigating this dense, opinionated work.