THE 'HE characteristic of a good prose style is, that, while it mirrors or embodies the mind that uses it, it also gives pleasure in itself. The quality which decides on its fulfilment of these conditions is commonly called taste.

Though taste is properly under law, and should, if pressed, give reasons for its decisions, many of its most authoritative judgments come from taste deciding by instinct, or insight, rather than taste deciding by rule. Indeed, the fine feeling of the beauty, melody, fitness, and vitality of words is often wanting in men who are dexterous in the application of the principles of style; and some of the most philosophic treatises on æsthetics betray a lack of that deep internal sense which directly perceives the objects and qualities whose validity it is the office of the understanding laboriously to demonstrate.

But whether we judge of style by our perceptions or by principles, we all feel that there is a distinction between persons who write books, and writers whose books belong to literature. There is something in the mere wording of a description of a triviality of dress or manner, by Addison or Steele, which gives greater mental delight than the description of a campaign or a revolution by Alison. The principle that style is thus a vital element in the expression of thought and emotion, that it not only measures the quality and quantity of the mind it conveys, but has a charm in itself, makes the task of an historian of literature less difficult than it at first appears. Among the prose-writers of the Age of Elizabeth we accordingly do not include all who wrote in prose, but those in whom prose composition was laboring to fulfil the conditions of art. In many cases this endeavor resulted in the substitution of artifice for art; and the bond which connects the invisible thought with the visible word, and through which the word is sur

charged with the life of the thought, being thus severed, the effect was to produce a factitious dignity, sweetness, and elegance by mental sleight of hand, and tricks of modulation and antithesis.

In one of the earliest prose-writers of the reign of Elizabeth, John Lylye, we perceive how easily the demand in the cultivated classes for what is fine in diction may degenerate into admiration of what is superfine; how elegant imbecility may pass itself off for elegance; and how hypocrisy and grimace may become a fashion in that high society which constitutes itself the arbiter of taste. Lylye, a scholar of some beauty, and more ingenuity, of fancy, was especially calculated to corrupt a language whose rude masculine vigor was beginning to be softened into harmony and elegance; for he was one of those effeminate spirits whose felicity it is to be born affected, and who can violate general nature without doing injustice to their own. The Court of Elizabeth, full of highly educated men and women, were greatly pleased with the fopperies of diction and sentiment, the dainty verbal confectionery of his so-called classic plays; and they seem to have been entirely carried away by his prose romance of "Euphues and his England," first published in 1579. Here persons of fashion might congratulate themselves that they could find a language which was not spoken by the vulgar. The nation, Sir Henry Blunt tells us, were in debt to him for a new English which he taught them; "all our ladies were his scholars "; and that beauty in court was disregarded "who could not parley Euphuism, that is to say, who was unable to converse in that pure and reformed English." Those who have studied the jargon of Holofernes in Shakespeare's "Love's Labor's Lost," of Fastidious Brisk in Ben Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," and, later still, of Sir Piercie

Shafton, in Scott's novel of "The Monastery," can form some idea of this "pure and reformed English," the peculiarities of which have been happily characterized to consist in "pedantic and far-fetched allusion, elaborate indirectness, a cloying smoothness and monotony of diction," and great fertility in "alliteration and punning." Even when Lylye seems really sweet, elegant,, and eloquent, he evinces a natural suspicion of the graces of nature, and contrives to divorce his rhetoric from all sincerity of utterance. There is something pretty and puerile even in his expression of heroism; and to say a good thing in a way it ought not to be said was to realize his highest idea of art. His attitude towards what was natural had a touch of that condescending commiseration which Colman's perfumed, embroidered, and mannered coxcomb extended to the blooming country girl The stooped to admire: "Ah, my dear! Nature is very well, for she made you; but then Nature could not have made me!"

This infection of the superfine in composition was felt even by writers for the multitude; and in the romances of Greene and Lodge we have euphuism as an affectation of an affectation. Even their habits of vulgar dissipation could not altogether keep them loyal to the comparative purity of the vulgar language. The fashion subtly affected even the style of Sidney, conscious as he was of its more obvious fooleries; and to this day every man who has anything of the coxcomb in his brain, who desires a dress for his thought more splendid than his thought, slides naturally into euphuism.

The name of Sir Philip Sidney stands in the English imagination for more than his writings, more than his actions, more than his character, for more, we had almost said, than the qualities of his soul. The English race, compound of Saxon and Norman, has been fertile in great generals, great statesmen, great poets, great heroes, saints, and martyrs, but it has not been fertile in great gentlemen; and Mr. Bull, pleVOL. XXII. NO. 131.

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thoric with power, but scant in courtesy, recognizes, with mingled feelings of surprise and delight, his great ornamental production in Sidney. He does not read the sonnets or the Arcadia of his cherished darling; he long left to an accomplished American lady the grateful task of writing an adequate biography of the phenomenon; but he gazes with a certain pathetic wonder on the one renowned gentleman of his illustrious house; speculates curiously how he came into the family; and would perhaps rather part with Shakespeare and Milton, with Bacon and Locke, with Burleigh and Somers, with Marlborough and Wellington, with Latimer and Ridley, than with this chivalrous youth, whose "high-erected thoughts were "seated in a heart of courtesy." It is not for superior moral or mental qualities that he especially prizes his favorite, for he has had children who have exceeded Sidney in both; but he feels that in Philip alone has equal genius and goodness been expressed in behavior.

Sidney was born on the 29th of November, 1554. His father was Sir Henry Sidney, a statesman of ability and integrity. His mother was Mary, sister of Robert Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester. No care was spared in the harmonious development of his powers, physical, mental, and moral; and his instructors were fortunate in a pupil blessed, not only with the love of knowledge, but with the love of that virtue which he considered the proper end of knowledge. He was intended for public life; and, leaving the university at the age of seventeen, he shortly after was sent abroad to study the languages, observe the manners, and mingle in the society of the Continent. He went nowhere that he did not win the hearts of those with whom he associated. Scholars, philosophers, artists, and men of letters, all were charmed with the ingenuous and high-spirited English youth, who visited foreign countries, not like the majority of his young countrymen, to partake of their dissipations and become initiated in

their vices, but to fill and enlarge his understanding, and ennoble his soul. Hubert Languet, a scholar of whom it is recorded "that he lived as the best of men should die," was especially captivated by Philip, became through life his adviser and friend, and said, "That day on which I first beheld him with my eyes shone propitious to me!"

After about three years' absence Sid-, ney returned to England variously accomplished beyond any man of his years: brave, honorable, and just; ambitious of political, of military, of literary distinction, and with powerful connections, competent, it might be supposed, to aid him in any public career on which his energies should be concentrated. But his very perfections seem to have stood in the way of his advancement. Such a combination of the scholar, the poet, and the knighterrant, one so full of learning, of lofty imagination, of chivalrous sentiment, was too precious as a courtier to be employed as a man of affairs; and Elizabeth admired, petted, praised, but hesitated to promote him. So fine an ornament of the nation could not be spared for its defence. Even his uncle Leicester, all-powerful as he seemed, failed in his attempts to aid the kinsman who was perhaps the only man that could rouse in his dark and scheming soul the feeling of affection. Sidney, who did not lack the knowledgeI had almost said the conceit-of his own merits, and whose temper was naturally impetuous, was far from being contented with the lot which was to make him the "mirror of courtesy," the observed and loved of all beholders, the Beau Brummel of the Age of Elizabeth, but which was to shut him out from the nobler ambitions of his manly and ardent nature, and prevent his taking that part which, both as a Protestant and patriot, he ached to perform in the stirring contests and enterprises of the time. Still, he submitted and waited; and the result is, that the incidents of the career of this man, born a hero and educated a statesman, were ludicrously disproportioned to his own

expectations and to his fame. In 1576 he was sent on an ornamental embassy to the Emperor of Germany. Soon after his return he successfully vindicated his father, who was Governor of Ireland, from some aspersions which had excited the anger of Elizabeth ; and threatened his father's secretary, whom he suspected of opening his own letters to Sir Henry, that he would thrust his dagger into him if the treachery was repeated; "and trust to it," he adds, "I speak it in earnest." He wrote a bold letter to the Queen, against her projected matrimonial alliance with the little French duke, on whose villanous person, and still more villanous soul, this "imperial votaress," so long walking the earth

"In maiden meditation, fancy free," had pretended to fix her virgin affections. He was shortly after, while playing tennis, called a puppy by the Earl of Oxford; and it is a curious illustration of the aristocratic temper of the times, that our Philip, who saw no obstacles in the way of thrusting his dagger, without the form of duel, into the suspected heart of his father's secretary, could not force this haughty and insolent Earl to accept his challenge; and the Queen put an end to the quarrel by informing him that there was a great difference in degree between earls and private gentlemen, and that princes were bound to support the nobility, and to, insist on their being treated with proper respect.

Wearied with court life, he now retired to Wilton, the seat of his famous sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and there embodied in his romance of the Arcadia the thoughts, sentiments, and aspirations he could not realize in practice. Campbell has said that Sidney's life "was poetry expressed in action"; but up to this time it had been poetry expressed in character, and denied an outlet in action. It now found an outlet in literature. Day after day he wrote under the eye of his beloved sister, with no thought of publication, the pages of this goodly folio. The form

of the Arcadia, it must be confessed, is somewhat fantastic, and the story tedious; but it is still so sound at the core, so pure, strong, and vital in the soul that animates it, and so much inward freshness and beauty are revealed the moment we pierce its outward crust of affectation, that no changes in the fashions of literature have ever been able to dislodge it from its eminence of place. There we may still learn the sweet lore of friendship and love; there we may still feed the heart's hunger, equally for scenes of pastoral innocence and heroic daring. A ray of

"The light that never was, on sea or land,"

gleams here and there over its descriptions, and proclaims the poet. The style of the book, in its good elements, was the best prose style which had yet appeared, — vigorous, harmonious, figurative, and condensed. In the characterizations of feminine beauty and excellence Spenser and Shakespeare are anticipated, if not sometimes rivalled. But all these merits are apt to be lost on the modern reader, owing to the fact that, though Sidney's thoughts were noble and his feelings genuine, his fancy was artificial, and incessantly labored to provide his rhetoric with stilts. It will not trust Nature in her "homely russet brown," but bedizens her in 、court trappings, belaces and embroiders her, is sceptical of everything in sentiment and passion which is easily great, and sometimes so elaborates all life out of expression, that language is converted from the temple of thought into its stately mausoleum. It cannot, we fear, be doubted that Sidney's court life had made him a little affected and conceited on the surface of his fine nature, if not in its substance. The Arcadia is rich in imagery, but in the same sentence we often find images that glitter like dew-drops followed by images that glitter like icicles; and there is every evidence that to his taste the icicles were finer than the dew-drops.

It may not here be out of place to say, that though we commonly think of Sidney as beautiful in face no less than

in behavior, he was not, in fact, a comely gentleman. Ben Jonson told Drummond that he "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, of high blood, and long."

In 1581 we find Sidney in Parliament. Shortly after he wrote his "Defence of Poesy," in which, assuming that the object of knowledge is right action, he attempted to prove the superiority of poetry to all other branches of knowledge, on the ground that, while the other branches merely coldly pointed the way to virtue, poetry enticed, animated, inspired the soul to pursue it. Fine as this defence of poetry is, the best defence of poetry is to write that which is good. In 1583 he was married to the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. As his whole heart and imagination were at this time absorbed by the Stella of his sonnets, the beautiful Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, and as his passion does not appear to have abated after her marriage with Lord Rich, Sidney must be considered to have failed in love as in ambition, marrying the woman he respected, and losing the woman he adored. And it is curious that the woman he did marry, soon after his death, married the Earl of Essex, brother of the woman he so much desired to marry.

In 1585 the Queen, having decided to assist the United Provinces, in their war against Philip of Spain, with an English army, under the command of Leicester, gratified Sidney's long thirst for honorable action by appointing him Governor of Flushing. In this post, and as general of cavalry, he did all that valor and sagacity could do to repair the blunders and mischiefs which inevitably resulted from the cowardice, arrogance, knavery, and military impotence of Leicester. On the 22d of September, 1586, in a desperate engagement near Zutphen, he was dangerously wounded in attempting to rescue a friend hemmed in by the enemy; and, as he was carried bleeding from the field, he performed the crowning act of his life. The cup of water, which his

lips ached to touch, but which he passed to the dying soldier with the words, "Thy necessity is greater than mine,”. this beautiful deed, worth a thousand defences of poetry, will consecrate his memory in the hearts of millions who will never read the Arcadia.

Sidney lay many days in great agony. The prospect of his death stirred Leicester into unwonted emotion. "This young man," he writes, "he was my greatest comfort, next her Majesty, of all the world; and if I could buy his life with all I have, to my shirt, I would give it." The account of his death, by his chaplain, is inexpressibly affecting. When the good man, to use his own words, "proved to him out of the Scriptures, that, though his understanding and senses should fail, yet that faith which he had now could not fail, he did, with a cheerful and smiling countenance, put forth his hand, and slapped me softly on the cheeks. Not long after he lifted up his eyes and hands, uttering these words, I would not change my joy for the empire of the world.'. . . . Having made a comparison of God's grace now in him, his former virtues seemed to be nothing; for he wholly condemned his former life. All things in it,' he said, 'have been vain, vain, vain.""

His sufferings were brought to a close on the 17th of October, 1586. Among the throng of testimonials to his excellence called forth by his death, only two were worthy of the occasion. The first was the simple remark of Lord Buckhurst, that "he hath had as great love in this life, and as many tears for his death, as ever any had." The second is a stanza from an anonymous poem, usually printed with the elaborate, but cold and pedantic, eulogy of Spenser, whose tears for his friend and patron seemed to freeze in their passage into words. The stanza has been often quoted, but rarely in connection with the person it characterizes:

"A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,

The lineaments of Gospel Books."

In passing from Sidney to Raleigh, we pass to a less beautiful and engaging, but far more potent and comprehensive spirit. We despair of doing justice to the various efficiency of this most splendid of adventurers, all of whose talents were abilities, and all of whose abilities were accomplishments; whose vigorous and elastic nature could adapt itself to all occasions and all pursuits, and who as soldier, sailor, courtier, colonizer, statesman, historian, and poet, seemed specially gifted to do the thing which absorbed him at the moment. Born in 1552, and the son of a Devonshire gentleman of ancient family, straitened income, and numerous children, fortune denied him wealth, only to lavish on him all the powers by which wealth is acquired. In his case, one of the most happily constituted of human intellects was lodged in a physical frame of perfect soundness and strength, so that at all periods of his life, in the phrase of the spiteful and sickly Cecil, he could "toil terribly." Action, adventure, was the necessity of his being. Imaginative and thoughtful as he was, the vision of imagination, the suggestion of thought, went equally to enlighten and energize his will. Whatever appeared possible to his brain he ached to make actual with his hand. Though distinguished at the university, he left it on the first opportunity for active life presented to him, and at the age of seventeen joined the band of gentleman volunteers who went to France to fight on the Protestant side in the civil war by which that kingdom was convulsed. In this rough work he passed five educating years. Shortly after his return, in 1580, an Irish rebellion broke out; and Raleigh, as captain of a company of English troops, engaged in the ruthless business of putting it down. A dispute having occurred between him and the Lord Deputy Grey, it was referred to the Council Board in England. Raleigh, determined, if possible, to escape from the squalid, cruel, and disgusting drudgery of an Irish war, exerted every resource of his pliant genius to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth; and urged his