^{Note 1 in page 1023} The thesis of this essay is implicitly so polemical that in this initial sketch of common assumptions I shall seek to avoid naming scholars and critics, except for those whose names defend themselves. I confess that the evidence adduced puts in question many things I have believed and taught; and that it also gives shape to some doubts I have long entertained.

^{Note 2 in page 1023} See, e.g., T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1932, et seq.), pp. 51–88.

^{Note 3 in page 1023} See Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), i, 197, praising Gorboduc for being like Seneca in style and morality but criticizing other drama of the time for its absurdities and monstrosities. J. C. Scaliger and Cicero are more often used and quoted by Sidney than Seneca, who is mentioned or quoted two or three times. Dryden's comments on the “indecency of tumults” will be found in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1962), i, 62.

^{Note 4 in page 1023} See, e.g., J. L. Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York, 1955). There was, of course, a “Renaissance Stoicism,” just as there had been a “Medieval Stoicism” which our commentators have neglected: see Max Pohlenx, Die Stoa (Göttingen, 1959), pp. 400–61, covering the period from Jesus Christ to the Pelagian debates; for a later period, see Klaus-Dieter Nothdurft, Studien zum Einfluss Senecas auf die Philosophie und Théologie des zw'ölften Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 1963): “Vom 12. Jarhhundert ab ist Seneca nicht unerheblich an der grossen Auseinandersetzung beteiligt, die im Mittlelalter zwischen Christentum und Antike stattfindet” (p. 201). For a popular but well-informed account, largely of France, see “L'Influence du Stoïcisme,” pp. 191–238, in André Bridoux, Le Stoïcisme et son influence (Paris, 1966), who is especially interesting about the ways in which one aspect of Stoicism yielded to another in popularity, and in the way in which thought like that of Pascal can be related to dramatists like Corneille and Racine; but the study is rather impressionistic.

^{Note 6 in page 1023} Croll's famous essays are reprinted, with other studies, in Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton, 1966); in their Forewords, the editors vary considerably in the scale of their generalizations. George Williamson's study is The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago, 1951).

^{Note 6 in page 1024} Williamson, p. 370.

^{Note 7 in page 1024} In the order of historical chronology of subject, see R. F. Jones, “Science and Language in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” JEGP, 31 (1932), 315–31; “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century,” PMLA, 45 (1930), 977–1009; and “Science and Criticism in the Neo-Classical Age of English Literature,” JHI, 1 (1940), 381–412; see also The Triumph of ihe. English Language (London, 1953).

^{Note 8 in page 1024} See, e.g., William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938; 1957), pp. 128–72.

^{Note 9 in page 1024} See, notably, K. G. Hamilton, The Two Harmonies: Poetry and Prose in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1963); something of the shift of emphasis in this book is clear from the numerous references to Cicero, the absence of Seneca, and the focus more upon the English scene, in the manner of Williamson after his first two chapters.

^{Note 10 in page 1024} Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600–1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1962), pp. 132 and 193; on the latter page, the three seventeenth-century references to Senecanism are all attacks on it, a matter referred to at the end of the essay. This is perhaps a suitable point at which to remark that classicists regard ancient authors differently, or more complexly, than do our scholars and critics of English literature. See C. N. Smiley, “Seneca and the Stoic Theory of Literary Style,” in Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Foster Smith, Wisconsin Stud, in Lang, and Lit., No. 3 (Madison, 1919), p. 61. “We can hardly call Seneca an Atticist. His literary form is obviously more closely related to the Asianism of Hierocles of Alabanda, whose style Cicero characterizes as ‘genus sententiosum et argutum.‘ ” (Cf. Williamson, p. 35.) See also Smiley, Latinitatis and : The Influence of the Stoic Theory of Style, Univ. of Wisconsin Philology and Literature Series, No. 3 (Madison, 1906), pp. 205–72. On Cicero's complex response to Stoicism, see, e.g., De Divinatione Libri Duo, ed. A. S. Pease (repr. Darmstadt, 1963), and De N attira Deorum, ed. A. S. Pease, 3 vols, in 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955–58). Cicero's writings vary in style as well as in thought. “Tully's Epistles,” which were so long popular and which are treated below as “Ciceronian” writings, vary in style from lengthy, rhythmic, “Ciceronian” periods to short, curt, “Senecan” periods. But an essay of this kind is not the place to sort out details long confused.

^{Note 11 in page 1025} Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (London, 1954), does with “Shakespearean” what critics thirty years ago were doing with “Metaphysical.”

^{Note 12 in page 1025} R⊘stvig, The Happy Man, 2 vols. (Oslo and Oxford, 1954); see i, 309, 314, 321, 334, 362, 431, and 445. I am not concerned with Vol. ii, treating the eighteenth century. If my essay has any specific origin, it is in rereading R⊘stvig in order to clarify my ideas about tendencies in Cavalier poetry; I discovered that in the second edition of Vol. I (Oslo, 1962), the repeated references in the first to Stoicism and Epicureanism disappear. In the first edition there had been more than seventy-five Index entries under “Stoicism”; under “Epicureanism and Epicurus” there had been fifteen plus a “Chapter v passim.” So remarkable, though silent, a change of front set me to inquire for means of learning just what was popular at one time or another in the period of 1530 to 1700.

^{Note 13 in page 1025} See n. 5, above.

^{Note 14 in page 1025} Croll, p. 207.

^{Note 15 in page 1025} Croll, p. 215.

^{Note 16 in page 1025} Rikutarõ Fukuda, “Hoivyaku no Rekishi,” in Nihonjin lo Gaikokugo (Tokyo, 1966), pp. 87–93. This is a fine instance of a literary hypothesis proven by fact.

^{Note 17 in page 1026} Throughout I use abbreviated titles. In particular, an “Ibid.” means only the same title or work, not necessarily the same edition or translation. For convenience's sake, and to account for usual periodization, I have broken the listings between 1599 and 1600 and again between 1659 and 1660. But I also distinguish frequently the half century from 1580 to 1630, when Stoicism and “the Shakespearean moment” were supposedly at their heights; and sometimes the logic of chronological grouping leads me to associate printings with a formally earlier or later period.

^{Note 18 in page 1029} See Williamson, pp. 65, 78, 135, and 149, for what seems to be this thesis.

^{Note 19 in page 1029} Although as usual in this essay I have listed publications only as they appear under their authors' names in the Short-Title Catalogues, I shall in this case mention that the “Golden Book,” as it is sometimes called, was included in The Diall of Princes of Antonio de Guevara, published in 1535 and twelve more times by 1573 as well as once in 1582. The thirteen publications prior to 1580 make it the most popular “Elizabethan” Stoic work. By either my usual method or by this amplified method, the Restoration retains its proportional lead over the period from 1580 to 1630.

^{Note 20 in page 1030} For completeness' sake, it may be added that Chaucer's translation of the Consolation appeared in 1478; another translation, by Walton, appeared in 152S. On Boethius' Stoic debts, see Pohlenz, Die Stoa, p. 399 (see n. 4, above).

^{Note 21 in page 1032} My generalizations about France must be taken skeptically. They are based on the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale and Appendix ii in R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, Eng., 1954; New York, 1964), which sets forth in tabular form translations of classical authors into five European languages before 1600. I thought of using similar evidence for England, but the fact that the national libraries of the two countries were not reallyfounded till the eighteenth century (the French nucleus, the Royal Library, had some 43,000 books in 1680) raises grave doubts about the reliability of using their present catalogues. Examination of the libraries of Merton College, Oxford, or of Trinity College, Cambridge, would avoid the problems posed by late establishment, but given donnish conservatism, these excellent libraries may have been out of touch with their times or may have found, like other libraries, that in some periods their budgets precluded wide purchases. Similarly, although the importation of books or translations from the continent must have been crucial (in a progressively diminishing degree) to the subject I am considering, it is impossible to ascertain when most of the foreign books now present in England were actually obtained, especially by libraries of later foundation. The best evidence of all would be “catalogues” of the libraries of English men of letters between 1530 and 1700. That evidence does not often exist. We know of some books owned by Donne; and of a writer as late as Dryden, we know that his copy of Spenser is in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The identity of his editions and the present whereabouts of his copies of the numerous authors, ancient and modern, quoted by Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poetry are matters all but entirely obscure. For all its limitations, the evidence from the two Short-Title Catalogues seems to be the best we are likely to have.

^{Note 22 in page 1032} Horace, Odes, i, xxxiv, has long been taken as evidence of conversion to a kind of Stoicism. But the interpretation has also been long resisted.

^{Note 23 in page 1033} See n. 10, above. There was a considerable body of anti-Stoic writing, usually from Christian and commonly Neo-platonic points of view. See Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethics, ed. Carol L. Marks and George Robert Guffey (Ithaca, N. Y., 1968), pp. 328–29; also Henry W. Sams, “Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” SP, 41 (1944), 65–78. Moreover, if we examine Restoration writings on Stoicism, we begin to see patterns that have been invisible to modern commentators. In The Court of the Gentiles (Oxford, 1671), Theophilus Gale criticizes pagan philosophy, as does Milton in Paradise Regained, published in the same year: pagan philosophy is no substitute for Christianity, whether the school be Stoicism (pp. 424–34), Scepticism (pp. 434–39), or Epicureanism (pp. 440–48). It is revealing that he finds good things to say of the first two, but none of the last. It is further significant that Gale claims Cicero to have been “mostly in love with Stoicism” (p. 247). Cicero was of course also known to be an Academic (i.e., skeptic, with an Academic lineage from Plato). Both the Restoration and Rome are badly in need of more accurate description by historians of English literature.

^{Note 24 in page 1034} E.g., although most studies of occult, Hermetic, or Neoplatonic thought suggest that “natural magic” most flourished between 1580 and 1630, my impression from the date of some major works (and indeed from the footnotes of modern studies) is that the period from 1640 to 1660 saw such lore at its height. So Samuel Butler thought, and so thinks William G. Madsen: see From Shadowy Types to Truth (New Haven, 1968), pp. 38–48.