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.

1

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

1 Mopsa is borrowed by Shakspeare.

recounts some of Pugliano's bravuras about the value of horseman. ship-"skill of government was but a pedanteria in comparison -and repeats some of his eloquent praises of the horse :—

"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 meantime, 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 204) that Sidney is versatile in the movement of his language. 1 It may have suggested the incomparable fun of the play before Theseus in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'

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 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.

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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 vulgarity 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.

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6

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 tears, about his future subsistence. From this he was relieved by the President of the College, who promised to be his friend; and some nine months after, through the recommendation of his late patron, he got as a pupil Edwin, son of Bishop Sandys, whose influence was afterwards of great service to him. For some ten years after this, he remained at Oxford, being admitted Fellow of his College in 1577, appointed to read Hebrew lectures in 1579, and in the same year temporarily expelled along with Reynolds for some reason now unknown. During this time he was an industrious reader, "enriching," says Walton, "his quiet and capacious soul with the precious learning of the philosophers, casuists, and schoolmen; and with them the foundation and reason of all laws, both sacred and civil; and indeed with such other learning as lay most remote from the track of common studies." In 1581, going to preach in London, he was led to make an unhappy marriage; and about the same time settled with his wife in the living of Drayton Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In 1584-85, at the recommendation of Sandys, whose son had seen and pitied the unhappiness of his old tutor's married life, Hooker was taken in hand by Archbishop Whitgift, and through his influence appointed Master of the Temple, in the Episcopal interest, and against a Presbyterian champion of the name of Travers. Here began Hooker's labours in defence of Episcopacy. Travers, a bold preacher, with a popular manner, was Afternoon Lecturer in the Temple, and maintained in the pulpit Presbyterian views of Church government. Hooker preaching in the forenoon, "the pulpit," as Fuller said, "spake pure Canterbury in the morning, and Geneva in the afternoon." Travers, silenced by Whitgift on the ground of insufficient ordination, continued the war in print; Hooker replied-but, unfit for the worry of controversy, begged from his patron some quiet post in the country, and in 1591 removed to the living of Boscombe, near Salisbury. Here in peace and privacy he meditated his Ecclesiastical Polity,' and published the first four Books in 1594. Translated in 1595 to the better living of Bishopsborne, near Canterbury, he sent a fifth Book to the press in 1597. He died in 1600, leaving three more Books of the Polity. The genuineness of these later books is doubted by Walton. On his and other evidence it is contended that the Sixth Book was mutilated by the Presbyterian friends of Hooker's wife, and interpolated with other matter taken from Hooker's papers; also that the Seventh and the Eighth received a bias from Presbyterian hands. The evidence of fraud, though not improbable, is scarcely conclusive. The good faith of Hooker's Episcopal friends is shown by their pub

lishing what they believed to be mutilated copies. The Sixth and Eighth Books were first published in 1651, the Seventh in 1662.

From Walton we have a circumstantial description of Hooker as a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thought of his soul; his body worn out, not with age, but study and holy mortifications; his face full of heat-pimples, begot by his inactivity and sedentary life." This account of his poor physique is borne out by other authorities. Dr Spenser says that his body was spent with study, and Fuller that his voice was low and his stature little. To complete his bodily infirmities, "though not purblind, he was short or weak sighted."

Impartial critics will not join the devoted admirers of Hooker in placing him among the greatest intellects of the nation. All his life through he was a most industrious student, and his acquisitions as a scholar were undeniably profound. But his original force, whether as a thinker or as an expositor, was not great.

As

a champion of Episcopacy, he added little or nothing to the arguments of Jewel and Whitgift. Even his high flights of eloquence are not always original; in many cases the ideas and the images are borrowed, the diction only being his own. In the application of his scholarship he is often very ingenious. His great fault, and it is fatal to the high pretensions set up for him, is a want of coherence. He seems incapable of the effort of closely concatenating his thoughts. As he writes, a quotation occurs to him having some dim application to his present subject; he puts down the quotation, but leaves its bearing vague and indistinct. Something like this is admitted, as it must be admitted, by his warmest eulogists. The explanation probably lies in his constitutional languor. What his intellect might have done in a more vigorous constitution of body, can be only a matter of speculation.-One thing may be noted by way of parenthesis. If in controversy his constitutional feebleness interfered with the clear and telling application of his scholarship, in another respect it gave him a great advantage over his opponents. It left him free from the impulses of vehement attachment; no impetuosity of conviction hurried him into unreason; he could always approach his subject with judicial calmness, and take a circumspect survey of his ground. This dispassionate habit strikes us in every sentence; it is Hooker's chief distinction amidst the fiery partisanship of the time. Whether his judgment was sound or unsound, he was eminently free from vehement prejudice, "or mist of passionate affection."

Perhaps the chief cause of the over-estimation of Hooker's intellectual force is the extraordinary musical richness of his language. Most of us are more influenced by mere pomp of sound than we