SOURCE: Scott-Thomas, H. F. “Nahum Tate and the Seventeenth Century.” ELH 1, no. 3 (December 1934): 250-75.

In the following essay, Scott-Thomas argues that Tate's work clung to the Elizabethan past, that he struggled unsuccessfully to explore in his writings newer ideas and modes, and that his psychological and intellectual preoccupation with the past resulted in a superficial quality in his writing.

The Restoration contains an appreciable quantity of literary expressions irreducible to the dominant forces at work in the epoch. … The Restoration is unable to forget the Renaissance. Not only does it preserve in its innermost self this subconscious remembrance, but it also possesses the other's creative faculties in a latent state, inhibited but always ready to reawaken; and under one form or another, through the artistic expressions of the moment, this secret quality allows itself to be seen or divined.¹

The work of the Laureate, Nahum Tate, was the...