blowing whole storms of hail and rain upon them, they were sooner in danger than they could almost bethink themselves of change. For then the traitorous sea began to swell in pride against the afflicted navy, under which, while the heaven favoured them, it had lain so calmly, making mountains of itself, over which the tossed and tottering ship should climb, to be straight carried down again to a pit of hellish darkness; with such cruel blows against the sides of the ship that, which way soever it went, was still in his malice that there was left neither power to stay, nor way to escape. But in the ship wherein the princes were, now left as much alone as proud lords be when fortune fails them, though they employed all industry to save themselves, yet what they did was rather for duty to nature than hope to escape so ugly a darkness as if it would prevent the night's coming, usurped the day's right: which accompanied sometimes with thunders, always with horrible noises of the chasing winds, made the masters and pilots so astonished that they knew not how to direct; and if they knew they could scarcely, when they directed, hear their own whistle. For the sea strove with the winds which should be louder, and the shrouds of the ship, with a ghastful noise to them that were in it, witnessed, that their ruin was the wager of the other's contention, and the heaven roaring out thunder the more amazed them as having those powers for enemies. There was to be seen the divers manner of minds in distress; some sat upon the top of the poop weeping and wailing, till the sea swallowed them; some one more able to abide death than the fear of death, cut his own throat to prevent drowning; some prayed; and there wanted not of them which cursed, as if the heavens could not be more angry than they were."

Pathos. In the 'Arcadia' there are very few passages to gratify the taste for the pathos of tender regret. Pitiable incidents occur very often, but they serve to keep alive the stir of the plot, and do not invite us to shut the book and indulge in melancholy tenderness. The misery of the sufferers is too intense to be pathetic. They suffer from the pangs of despised love, from the agony of bereavement, from the rage of remorse; they are not resigned to their fate.

The following are two exceptions to the above general statement -two pitiful incidents that have no influence on the plot, and are good subjects for pathetic treatment. One is the death of young Agenor, related with genuine pathos. Had the death of the gay youth been wilful, it would have moved us with horror; being an accident, it touches us with sorrow as for an unavoidable and irremediable misfortune:

"His name was Agenor, of all that army the most beautiful; who having ridden in sportful conversation among the foremost, all armed, saving that his beaver was up, to have his breath at more freedom, seeing Amphialus come a pretty way before his company, neither staying the commandment of his captain, nor reckoning whether his face were armed or no, set spurs to his horse, and with youthful bravery casting his staff about his head, put it then in his rest, as careful of comely carrying it as if the mark had been but a ring and the lookers-on ladies. But Amphialus's lance was already come to the last of his descending line, and began to make the full point of death against the head of this young gentleman; when Amphialus, perceiving his youth and beauty, compassion so rebated the edge of choler that

he spared that fair nakedness, and let his staff fall to Agenor's vampalt: so as both with brave breaking should hurtlessly have performed that match, but that the pitiless lance of Amphialus (angry with being broken) with an unlucky counterbuff, full of unsparing splinters, lighted upon that face, far fitter for the combats of Venus; giving not only a sudden but a foul death, leaving scarcely any tokens of his former beauty; but his hands abandoning the reins and his thighs the saddle, he fell sideward from the horse."

The other is the death of Parthenia a lady who, when her husband was slain, put on armour, challenged his victor, and perished in the fight. Sidney overlays this painful subject with his favourite figures. It is difficult to feel in what mood such an incident could appear a suitable ground for such embroidery :

:

"But the head-piece was no sooner off, but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which with the face (soon known by the badge of excellency) witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in despight of the passed sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes, having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them, her round sweetly-swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbour death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound, which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of an unaffected languishing: though these things to a grossly conceiving sense might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looked upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness; so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.'

Sidney's true pathos lies chiefly in pictures of beauty and devotedness. With such subjects his fancies are more in keeping. We have seen (p. 203) with what sweetness he can describe natural scenery. In his descriptions of female beauty, he is sometimes a little more sensuous than the taste of our period thinks becoming. But there is much of his description that none need hesitate to read. The following hyperbolical passage contains what is probably the original of one of Shakspeare's sweetest fancies:

"Her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer; and yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry; no more all that our eyes can see of her (though when they have seen her, what else they shall ever see is but dry stubble after clover-grass) is to be matched with the flock of unspeakable virtues, laid up delightfully in that best-builded fold."

His personifications appear to advantage in such passages as this

:

"And as the ladies played there in the water, sometimes striking it with their hands, the water (making lines on his face) seemed to smile at such beating, and, with twenty bubbles, not to be content to have the picture of their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them."

The Arcadia' is brimful of chivalrous devotion. Every personage is one of a pair of lovers-Pyrocles and Philoclea, Musidorus and Pamela, Helen and Amphialus, Amphialus and Pamela, Argalus and Parthenia, Phalantus and Artesia, &c. The friendship of Pyrocles and Musidorus is like the friendship of Pylades and Orestes. When the one is supposed to be drowned, the other is restrained only by force from casting himself into the sea. When the one is seized and threatened with death, the other insists upon taking his place. It would indeed be difficult to make any alteration in the plot that should bring out more numerous or more striking acts of devotedness.

Humour.-Sidney's humour is hearty, joyous-bordering sometimes upon farce, but usually refined by the wit of the expression. In the Arcadia' he has one or two humorous characters, notably Dametas and Mopsa; and describes some exquisitely ludicrous scenes, such as the fight between the two cowards Dametas and Clinias, and Mopsa in the wishing-tree. The following passage, occurring in the description of a riot, is very farcical, without much wit to give it refinement :—

"Yet among the rebels there was a dapper fellow, a tailor by occupation, who fetching his courage only from their going back, began to bow his knees, and very fencer-like to draw near to Zelmane. But as he came within her distance, turning his sword very nicely about his crown, Basilius struck off his nose. He (being suitor to a seamstress's daughter, and therefore not a little grieved for such a disgrace) he stooped down, because he had heard that if it were fresh put to, it would cleave on again. But as his hand was on the ground to bring his nose to his head, Zelmane with a blow sent his head to his nose."

There is a boyish freshness and simplicity about the humour of the Apology. In the beginning, by way of anticipating the criticism that he is a prejudiced enthusiast in favour of poetry, he tells a humorous story to bring out that "self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties." He tells us how he and a friend took lessons of a ridingmaster in Vienna, and that this gentleman, "according to the fertileness of the Italian wit, did not only afford us the demonstration of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations therein, which he thought most precious." He then recounts some of Pugliano's bravuras about the value of horsemanship-"skill of government was but a pedanteria in comparison" --and repeats some of his eloquent praises of the horse :

1 Mopsa is borrowed by Shakspeare.

"The only serviceable courtier without flattery, the beast of most beauty, faithfulness, courage, and such more, that if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse."

His argument for the unities is enlivened by a similar spirit of boisterous mockery :

"For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day: there is both many days and many places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest? Where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is or else the tale will not be conceived. Now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a Garden. By-and-by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a Rock. "Upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a Cave. While in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now, of time they are much more liberal, for ordinary it is that two princes fall in love. After many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours space: which how absurd it is in sense," &c.

This must have been very amusing ridicule1 of the stage as it existed in Sidney's time, though from the change of circumstances it has not the same effect for us. The mock-heroic close of the Apology has not yet lost its force, though even it is perhaps too exuberant for modern taste:

"Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the Printer's shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all,-you shall dwell upon superlatives. But if (fie of such a But) you be borne so near the dull-making Cataphract of Nilus that you cannot hear the Planet-like Music of Poetry, if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of Poetry; or rather, by a certain rustical disdain will become such a Mome, as to be a Momus of Poetry: then, though I will not wish unto you the Ass's ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poet's verses (as Bubonax was) to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph."

Melody. Harmony.-We have already remarked (Sentences, p. 201) that Sidney is versatile in the movement of his language. Every reader must notice how readily he adapts his rhythm to pointed wit or flowing declamation. Few of our writers surpass him in soaring and bringing out a full melodious cadence. The last-quoted sentence is as measured and stately in its movement as

1 It may have suggested the incomparable fun of the play before Theseus in Midsummer Night's Dream.'

could well be found. In some of the tender passages, the music of the language is such as can hardly be imitated under present laws of taste as regards epithets. The following is an instance-"the nightingales one with the other striving which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow.”

It is needless to review Sidney's style at length under the kinds of composition. We have seen that he has no descriptive method -that the only merit of his description lies in the graces of his style. As a Narrator, he relates events with clearness; but the different lines of events are so numerous and interwoven that it is difficult to avoid getting confused among them. To those that do not enjoy the beauties of his language, the numerous speeches and meditations must appear a tedious impediment to the action. As regards Exposition, all has been said under the intellectual qualities. In the way of Persuasion, his Apology would tell partly by its clear and ingenious arguments, partly by its winning playfulness of manner and impetuous exuberance of spirits.

RICHARD HOOKER, 1553-1600.

The following estimate of Hooker by the author of the 'Introduction to the Literature of Europe' is often quoted: "So stately "and graceful is the march of his periods, so various the fall of his "musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vul"garity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that "I know not whether any later writer has more admirably dis"played the capacities of our language, or produced passages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity.' Though this eloquent panegyric is an extreme exaggeration, and could never have been written by any person keeping his eye on the facts, the Ecclesiastical Polity' does undoubtedly, as is often said, "mark an era in English prose." In some respects superior, in some inferior to Sidney's, Hooker's style is the first specimen of good prose applied to the weightier purposes of literature.

According to Izaak Walton, in one of his well-known "Lives," Hooker was born at Heavitree, in or near Exeter. His parents were poor, but of respectable family; his uncle John was Chamberlain of Exeter. His father designed to apprentice him to a trade; but his schoolmaster, seeing the boy's abilities, was solicitous that he should get learning, and spoke to the chamberlain uncle. The uncle spoke to Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, who examined the young prodigy, found him all that the good schoolmaster represented, gave him a pension, and in 1567 got him admitted as a Clerk (sizar, servitor, or bursar) to Corpus Christi, Oxford. In 1571 his patron died, and Hooker was greatly dejected, and even in fears, about his