text:  No sooner had tranquillity been restored after the long civil wars of the Roses--no sooner had men's minds been set free to enter the fields of speculation opened up by the Reformation than in the short space of the life of one man--than in the space of seventy years there arose such men as Spenser and Milton and Shakspeare and Sydney and Raleigh and Bacon and Hobbes and Cudworth and a whole phalanx of other great men inferior only to them in the brightness of original genius