desert gave he abundant flowers from whence to gather honey, and in the end of harvest burnt them in the hive! How many wives did he cut off and cast off, as his fancy and affection changed! How many princes of the blood (whereof some of them for age could hardly crawl towards the block), with a world of others of all degrees (of whom our common chronicles have kept the account), did he execute! Yea, in his very deathbed, and when he was at the point to have given his account to God for the abundance of blood already spilt, he imprisoned the Duke of Norfolk the father, and executed the Earl of Surrey the son; the one, whose deservings he knew not how to value, having never omitted anything that concerned his own honour and the king's service; the other, never having committed anything worthy of his least displeasure: the one exceeding valiant and advised; the other no less valiant than learned, and of excellent hope. But besides the sorrows which he heaped upon the fatherless and widows at home, and besides the vain enterprises abroad, wherein it is thought that he consumed more treasure than all our victorious kings did in their several conquests; what causeless and cruel wars did he make upon his own nephew King James the Fifth ! What laws and wills did he devise, to establish this kingdom in his own issues! using his sharpest weapons to cut off and cut down those branches, which sprang from the same root that himself did. And in the end (notwithstanding these his so many irreligious provisions) it pleased God to take away all his own, without increase; though, for themselves in their several kinds, all princes of eminent virtue.

(From the Preface to The History of the World.)

THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

GOD, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a power uneffable, and virtue infinite; a light by abundant clarity invisible; an understanding which itself can only comprehend; an essence eternal and spiritual, of absolute pureness and simplicity; was and is pleased to make himself known by the work of the world; in the wonderful magnitude whereof (all which he embraceth, filleth, and sustaineth) we behold the image of that glory which cannot be measured, and withal, that one, and yet universal

nature which cannot be defined. In the glorious lights of heaven we perceive a shadow of his divine countenance; in his merciful provision for all that live, his manifold goodness; and lastly, in creating and making existent the world universal, by the absolute art of his own word, his power, and almightiness; which power, light, virtue, wisdom, and goodness, being all but attributes of one simple essence, and one God, we in all admire, and in part discern per speculum creaturarum, that is, in the disposition, order, and variety of celestial and terrestrial bodies: terrestrial, in their strange and manifold diversities; celestial, in their beauty and magnitude; which, in their continual and contrary motions, are neither repugnant, intermixed, nor confounded. By these potent effects we approach to the knowledge of the omnipotent Cause, and by these motions, their almighty Mover.

(From The History of the World.)

DEATH

O ELOQUENT, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!

Lastly, whereas this book, by the title it hath, calls itself The First Part of the General History of the World, implying a second and third volume, which I also intended, and have hewn out; besides many other discouragements persuading my silence, it hath pleased God to take that glorious Prince out of the world, to whom they were directed, whose unspeakable and never enough lamented loss hath taught me to say with Job, Versa est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium.

(From the Same.)

THE LAW OF CHANGE

IT is the qualifications of our contemporaries, of the men that dwell at the same time with us, must make us happy or miserable;

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it must be their wisdom, justice, and honour, which are not local, as the law calls it, tied or annexed to a place, but moving and transitory as fortune itself. For there is the same proportion of good and evil in the world as ever, though it shifts and changes, not always in the same place, and never in the same degree; even the holy worship of God, religion, through the wickedness of men, has had its marches. Nor is man alone the subject of alteration and vicissitude; but the earth itself is sometimes dry land, and sometimes overwhelmed with waters; and a fruitful land has been turned into barrenness for the wickedness of them that dwell therein. All sublunaries being in continual motion, little knowledge in history will convince us, that persons, families, countries, and nations, have alternately fallen from great wealth, honour, and power, to poverty and contempt, and to the very dregs of slavery. We must look a long way back to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.

It would be an unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe, but he that is honest. All I have designed is peace to my country; and may England enjoy that blessing when I shall have no more proportion in it than what my ashes make!

(From A Discourse of War.)

THE ABSENCE OF THE QUEEN

My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet nigher at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less: but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I, that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph, sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel, sometime playing like Orpheus; behold the sorrow of this

world! once amiss hath bereaved me of all. O glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance! all wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity, or when is grace witnessed but in offences? There were no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires, can they not weigh down one frail misfortune? not one drop of gall be hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, spes et fortuna, valete. She is gone in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that was. Do with me now therefore what you list. I am more weary of life than they are desirous I should perish, which if it had been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born.

Can

(From A Letter to Sir Robert Cecil.)

THOMAS LODGE

[Thomas Lodge, born about 1556 at West Ham, was the son of a grocer in the city, afterwards Lord Mayor, in whose will however he found no mention. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Lincoln's Inn. His first publication, provoked and afterwards answered by Gosson, the Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage-plays (1579-80) was prohibited by authority. Some four or five years later he seems to have entered upon a series of journeys, partly buccaneering expeditions, on one of which he contrived to compose his well-known work, Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy (1590). During the intervals, and probably for some years following, he inhabited Bohemia in London, producing both prose and verse for the booksellers, and plays for the stage, and enjoying scant personal repute. In his later years-perhaps from 1596 onwards, when a publication of his is dated from Low Leyton, he practised medicine, in which he is said to have graduated at Avignon. His non-professional writings were now principally translations from the classics. In 1616 he was again abroad; but he died in London, of the plague, in 1625. His works are still uncollected and in part difficult of access.]

IT is futile to seek in the remains of a writer such as Lodge for the traces of a style peculiar to the man, who seems to have been innocent of any uneasy pretence to originality of manner. The work of his pen, should it at any time prove possible to marshal in consecutive order its disjecta membra, would possibly prove all the more instructive, as a collective illustration of the literary history of his age. He was a man of extremely varied experience both in and outside the world of letters of which he claimed the freedom; and, to use his own phrase, he fell from "books to arms," as easily as he exchanged Justinian for Galen, or Alsatia for the Spanish Main. In his Defence of Stage-plays and in his Alarm against Usurers, dedicated without any particular relevancy to Sir Philip Sidney, he had but journalised on themes with which he could claim something more than a bowing acquaintance. When, while accompanying Captain Clarke on his patriotic raid upon the Canaries, he composed his Rosalynde,