Social Life Under the Stuarts (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Social Life Under the Stuarts In the first scheme of that book all these matters were to have been dealt with, but it soon appeared that the book would have grown to excessive bulk, so it seemed best to divide personal life in the home from personal life in the world, and to devote a separate volume to the latter. To the student much that is here treated of will no doubt be familiar, but for many readers it may not be superfluous to gather together the gleanings from an infinite number of sources into a connected general view of the forty-six years with which it deals - the reigns, namely, of the first two Stuart kings of England. For in these matters still more than on its domestic side the period has a singular completeness in itself, separated by rapid growth and development from the Elizabethan age, by a chasm from the era of the Restoration. Whether we look at it from the side of the arts, of science, or of religion, the contrast is sharp both to what went before and to what followed. To take music: those years saw concerted music emerge from the disconnected crowd of instruments of the lute or mandoline order, and crystallise into the balanced symmetry of violin, viola, and 'cello, with wood-wind, brass, and percussion, forming the band much as we have it now; they saw, moreover, the rise of a school of church music, which is perhaps one of the best things that England has to boast of in that kind, which attained its ripened perfection on the eve of the war, and was by that war and its consequences absolutely cut off. Other important developments followed later, but they were on distinctly different lines, and owed much more to foreign influences, both German and Italian. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.