that right soldier-like nation think the chiefest kindlers of brave courage. The incomparable Lacedæmonians did not only carry that kind of music ever with them to the field, but even at home, as such songs were made, so were they all content to be the singers of them, when the lusty men were to tell what they did, the old men what they had done, and the young men what they would do. And where a man may say, that Pindar many times praiseth highly victories of small moment, matters rather of sport than virtue; as it may be answered, it was the fault of the poet, and not of the poetry: so indeed, the chief fault was in the time and custom of the Greeks, who set those toys at so high a price, that Philip of Macedon reckoned a horse-race won at Olympus, among his three fearful felicities. But as the inimitable Pindar often did, so is that kind most capable and most fit to awake the thoughts from the sleep of idleness, to embrace honourable enterprises.

There rests the Heroical, whose very name (I think) should daunt all back-biters; for by what conceit can a tongue be directed to speak evil of that which draweth with it no less champions than Achilles, Cyrus, Æneas, Turnus, Tydeus, and Rinaldo? Who doth not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth. Who maketh magnanimity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires. Who, if the saying of Plato and Tully be true, that who could see virtue, would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty: this man sets her out to make her more lovely in her holiday apparel, to the eye of any that will deign not to disdain, until they understand. But if anything be already said in the defence of sweet poetry, all concurreth to the maintaining the Heroical, which is not only a kind, but the best and most accomplished kind of poetry. For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies, most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. Only let Æneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country, in the preserving his old father and carrying away his religious ceremonies, in obeying the gods'. commandment to leave Dido, though not only all passionate kindness, but even the humane consideration of virtuous gratefulness, would have craved other of him. How in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious,

how besieged, how besieging, how to strangers, how to allies, how to enemies, how to his own; lastly, how in his inward self, and how in his outward government. And I think, in a mind not prejudiced with a prejudicating humour, he will be found in excellency fruitful; yea even as Horace saith,

Melius Chrysippo et Crantore.

But truly I imagine, it falleth out with these poet-whippers, as with some good women, who often are sick, but in faith they cannot tell where. So the name of poetry is odious to them, but neither his cause, nor effects, neither the sum that contains him, nor the particularities descending from him, give any fast handle to their carping dispraise.

(From The Defence of Poësy.)

THE HONOUR OF POESY

So that sith the ever praise-worthy poesy, is full of virtue-breeding delightfulness, and void of no gift that ought to be in the noble name of learning; sith the blames laid against it, are either false, or feeble; sith the cause why it is not esteemed in England, is the fault of poet-apes, not poets; sith lastly, our tongue is most fit to honour poesy, and to be honoured by poesy : I conjure you all, that have had the evil luck to read this inkwasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of poesy; no more to laugh at the name of poets, as though they were next inheritors to fools; no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer: but to believe with Aristotle, that they were the ancient treasurers of the Grecians' divinity. To believe with Bembus, that they were first bringers in of all civility. To believe with Scaliger, that no philosophers' precepts can sooner make you an honest man, than the reading of Virgil. To believe with Clauserus, the translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the heavenly Deity, by Hesiod and Homer, under the veil of fables to give us all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, natural and moral, and quid non? To believe with me, that there are many mysteries contained in poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. To believe with Landin, that they are so

beloved of the gods, that whatsoever they write, proceeds of a divine fury. Lastly, to believe themselves, when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verses.

Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers' 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. Thus doing, though you be libertino patre natus, you shall suddenly grow Herculea proles,

si quid mea carmina possunt.

Thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante's Beatrix, or Virgil's Anchises. But if (fie of such a but !) you be born so near the dull making cataract 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.

(From the Same.)

LORD BROOKE

[Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, was the son of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamp Hall, Warwickshire, and his immediate ancestry connected him with the houses of Beauchamp, Neville, and Willoughby. He was born in 1554, and educated at Shrewsbury School (with Sir Philip Sidney whose friend he was till death). He then, it would seem, went to Jesus College, Cambridge, not, as was formerly thought, to Trinity. He was afterwards admitted a Master of Arts at Oxford, and may have been in even a fuller sense utriusque academiæ, as so many men were then. He shared Sidney's court favour, and standing-with the usual vicissitudes-high in Elizabeth's good graces, was appointed to valuable offices in Wales. He had also lavish

He

grants in Warwickshire, was knighted in 1597, sat pretty constantly in Parliament for his native county, and founded a historical lectureship, the lapse of which is unexplained, at Cambridge. For some time after Elizabeth's death (though it was at James's coronation that he received Warwick Castle, the most memorable of royal bounties to him) he lived in retirement. emerged therefrom and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1614, and was, in 1620, raised to the peerage as Lord Brooke of Beauchamp, with remainder, as he was not married, to a cousin. In his old age Sir William Davenant was a member of his household. His end was strange and tragic, it being asserted that he was stabbed in the back by an old servant named Heywood, who was enraged at not finding himself named in his master's will. This happened in Brooke House, Holborn, on the first or thirtieth of September 1628. The story seems to have been somewhat hushed up, and there is evidence (of no very trustworthy character) that Brooke was not personally popular. His extremely remarkable poems do not form part of our subject. They were, with a few insignificant exceptions, not published till after his death, and his prose appeared still later. The first complete edition of his works was that of Dr. Grosart, privately printed, 4 vols. 1870.]

AN unseasonable wit, yet one not wholly alien from the Elizabethan spirit, might say that before discussing Fulke Greville as a prose writer, it ought to be settled whether the subject is limited to his writings in prose. Certain it is that much of his singular work in verse-poems of monarchy, treatises on religion, tracts on human learning and what not-is by subject always, and by treatment sometimes, rather prosaic, despite the extraordinary

flashes, the black lightning, as it has been fancifully called, of poetry with which Lord Brooke everywhere illuminates his subjects. But his actual work in prose, though not extensive, is interesting enough. Of the four pieces of which it nominally consists, one, the letter to Greville Varney, is brief and (as far as it was possible for Greville ever to be so) common-place: another, the "short speech for Bacon," is a mere fragment. The remaining two, the so-called “Life of Sir Philip Sidney,” and the “Letter to an Honourable Lady," are of infinitely more importance. The surprising nature of the contents of the first is sufficiently accounted for when it is remembered that Greville neither called it by its present title, nor regarded it as any such thing. It was avowedly meant as an autobiographic preface to his own works, in which he endeavoured to illustrate what later phrase-mongers would call his soul-history by elaborate panegyric of Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth, the two persons who had exercised most influence on his character and career. As for the "Letter to an Honourable Lady," I am absolutely unable to perceive the slightest ground for identifying the lady with Penelope Devereux, as Dr. Grosart and others have done. Scarcely one single point of the problem which Greville outlines-the falling out of a married pair who had married for love and had become sundered by the preference of the husband for a mistress—agrees with what we know of the relations of Lord and Lady Rich, while the general picture of husband and wife given here is as unlike as possible to what is known both of "Stella" and her husband. But here again the ostensible subject of the "Letter" (which it seems was a mere literary exercise and was never sent) is but distantly related to its actual contents. These consist of divers cogitations on love-marriage, now, as is Greville's wont, of an astonishing profundity and suggestiveness, now, as is too often the case with him, pervaded by an obscurity which affects equally the drift of particular passages and the connection of those passages one with the other.

Brief as these two books or pieces are (for they do not together fill three hundred pages, each of which has not half the capacity of this present) they are among the most remarkable minor works in Elizabethan prose: and they may perhaps be said to exhibit the chief characteristics of that prose in such a way as to escape altogether the reproach of minority. Here are the special defects of the time-the want of fluency and ease natural