Thus ends the story of Argalus and Parthenia, which is only one of the many episodes of The Arcadia.

Although

it is a little stilted for our modern taste, and many sentences are involved and over-full of words, there are many touches of nature and of feeling in it that will go straight to the heart.

Close beside Sidney should come the name of his biographer and bosom friend, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who desired to have for his epitaph that he had been "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellor to King James and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." He was a courtier-poet, who wrote plays and sonnets in verse, and a life of his friend Sidney, in prose, which is most to be valued of all his works.

It is said that Sidney intended the princes in the Arcadia, Pyrocles and Musidorus, for himself and Lord Brooke. The two gentlemen were very close and dear friends during Sidney's short life. Lord Brooke long outlived his friend, dying at an advanced age. One of the writers of the time says of him that of all Queen Elizabeth's favorites "he had the longest lease and the smoothest time without rub," and that "he came to court backed with a plentiful fortune, which, as he was wont to say, was better held together by a single life, wherein he lived and died, a constant courtier of the ladies." He would hardly have gained mention in the present as a literary man if it were not for his friendship with Sidney, and his biography of him, which gives him an honorable place among this group of worthies.

TALK XIX.

ON SIR WALTER RALEIGH, SAMUEL Daniel, and MICHAEL DRAYTON.

LIKE Sir Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh was a man of large gifts, and so wonderfully versatile that what Born 1552 he did in literature seems only the diversion of his Died 1618 leisure hours. Hardly less full of beauty and vitality than Sidney, Raleigh holds our interest to the end of his long life. Sidney died in early manhood, but Raleigh outlived his generation. Spenser, Essex, Shakspeare, all were dead, when, at sixty-six, he laid his noble, handsome head under the axe of King James' headsman. He was not only a poet and scholar-a man of scientific attainments, too,— but a clear-headed statesman, an adventurous sailor, a skillful military leader, and a polished orator.

Raleigh wrote the first part of a great History of the World. He never finished the work, and all there is of it is in one great, ponderous folio, which we should find dull reading. There is also a little volume of his poems collected, but it is disputed whether or no he wrote some of the best included in this handful. I like best of all his writings, or any that have been ascribed to him, his private letters, which are written in vigorous English, in the style of a master of language. Here is an extract from one that he wrote to Robert Cecil, who had just lost his wife, a kinswoman of Raleigh. He begins:

"There is no man sorry for death itself, but only for the time of death, every one knowing that it is a bond never forfeited of God. If, then, we know the same to be certain and inevitable, we ought to take the time of his arrival in as good part as the knowledge, and

not to lament on the instant of every seeming adversity which has been on the way to us from the beginning.

"It pertaineth to every man of a wise and worthy spirit to draw together into sufferance the unknown future to the known past. * * It is true that you have lost a good and virtuous wife, and myself an honored friend and kinswoman, but there was a time when she was unknown to you, for whom you then lamented not. She is now no more yours, nor of your acquaintance, but immortal, and not needing your love and sorrow. Therefore you do but grieve for that which is as then it was, when she was not yours, only bettered, with this difference, that she hath past the wearisome journey of this dark world, and hath possession of her inheritance.

"I believe that sorrows are dangerous companions, converting bad into evil and evil into worse. They are the treasures of weak hearts, and foolish. The mind of man is that part of God in us, which, by so much as it is subject to any passion, by so much is it further from him that gave it us. Sorrows draw not the dead to life, but the living to

death."

Such noble and serene philosophy as this, Raleigh might not always be able to live up to, and, indeed, there were times when his own great troubles drew from him passions of grief such as he argues against. But he lived a life full of useful activity, and met death bravely on the scaffold. We as Americans owe him remembrance, because he did more than any other one man of his time to further the colonizing of America; worked and planned for it till his fortunes failed. And when he was arrested for treason by King James, and imprisoned in the Tower, he still said in a spirit of prophecy-for American affairs never looked more hopeless" I shall yet live to see that an English nation.”

When he ascended the scaffold, the little colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was eight years old, and the Puritans in Holland were just forming their plans for emigration to the New World. As he closed his eyes upon the world, is it just possible that Raleigh may have seen, in that one struggling offshoot from the parent State just fastened on the shores of Virginia, a dim foreshadowing of that great nation of English stock which in two centuries and a half should cover America from ocean to ocean?

The name of Samuel Daniel has grouped itself closely in my mind among the friends of Spenser, perhaps be- Born 1562. cause some one has ventured a guess that the Rosa- Died 1619. linde with whom Spenser fell in love, when he wrote the Shepherd's Calendar, was Rose Daniel, a sister of this poet. He was a musician's son, which has given his biographer reason to say that the poet inherited his father's melody and put it into his verse. He wrote such flowing, pure English, that he was called "well-languaged Daniel," and some of his little songs are very graceful and musical. It is a pity that instead of writing lyrics, he should have taken a dry subject in history for the theme of his most ambitious poem. This was The History of the Civil Wars, in which he puts the Wars of the Roses into verse. It speaks well for his genius that he has managed to infuse a little breath of poetry into so dull a recital.

A subject, even more dull than this of Daniel, was used by another poet of this group. This is the Polyolbion, written by Michael Draytor; which is nothing less than a geographical description of England, written in about thirty thousand lines of twelve-syllabled verse. There is a great deal that is interesting in the Polyolbion and in so much verse there must be some poetry; but I am sure even the genius of Spenser could not have made anything but a dull poem out of such a dull theme, and, in consequence, nobody ever reads the Polyolbion.

TALK XX.

ON FRANCIS BACON, BARON VERULUM, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS.

FRANCIS BACON is the great philosopher, the most profound thinker of his age. His system of philosophy, which is called from him the Baconian system, wrought a revolution in thought, and has had a great influence on human action from his time to ours. I shall not attempt to explain his philosophy, because philosophy and science do not come within the province of these talks, but will simply tell you that all his efforts were to make philosophy of practical benefit to humanity, rather than to keep men wandering in a vague region of inquiry upon points that the mind never can solve. He taught men to reason from experience, to found their knowledge on results gained by experience, applying it to works really useful to mankind. Hitherto, the philosopher had been a man occupied with abstract questions, carrying his head aloft in the clouds; Bacon occupied himself with questions that bore upon the comfort of human beings and the improvement of human conditions. As Macaulay has said, in few words, "Bacon taught that philosophy was made for man, not man for philosophy."

Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Born 1561, Bacon, Lord-keeper of the Seal under Queen ElizaDied 1626. beth. His uncle, Lord Burleigh, was England's finance minister for nearly half a century, and Robert Cecil, Bacon's cousin, was one of the ablest and most powerful politicians of the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the first half of the reign of James I. Surrounded by kinsfolk so great, it might be fancied that Bacon's fortunes were as