But no demerits were recognised in Sidney by his contemporaries. He was, in the obsolete terminology of his admiring friend, Gabriel Harvey, 'the secretary of eloquence, the breath of the Muses, the honey bee of the daintiest flowers of wit and art, the pith of moral and intellectual virtues, the arm of Bellona in the field, the tongue of Suada in the chamber, the spirit of practice in esse, and the paragon of excellency in print.'1 His literary work, no less than his life, magnetised the age. His example fired scores of Elizabethans to pen long sequences of sonnets in that idealistic Influence of the Arcadia. tone of his, which itself reflected the temper of Petrarch and Ronsard. His massive romance of Arcadia appealed to contemporary taste despite its confusions, and was quickly parent of a long line of efforts in fiction which exaggerated its defects. Elizabethan dramatists attempted to adapt episodes of Sidney's fiction to the stage. Shakespeare himself based on Sidney's tale of an unkind king' the incident of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear. It was not only at home that his writings won the honour of imitation. The fame of the Arcadia spread to foreign countries. Seventeenth-century France welcomed it in translations as warmly as the original was welcomed in England. It was indeed by very slow degrees that the Arcadia was dethroned either at home or abroad. In the eighteenth century it had its votaries still. Richardson borrowed the name of Pamela from one of Sidney's princesses. Cowper hailed with delight those Arcadian scenes sung by 'a warbler of poetic prose.' But the revolt against the predominance of Sidney's romance could not then be long delayed. English fiction of ordered insight was coming into being. The Arcadia, which defied so much of the reality of 1 Pierces Supererogation, etc. life could not breathe the true atmosphere, and it was relagated to obscurity. Historically it remains a monument of deep interest to literary students, but its chief attraction is now that of a curious effigy; the breath of life has fled from it. The final impression of his life and work. Yet, despite the ephemeral character of the major part of Sidney's labours, the final impression that his brief career left on the imagination of his countrymen was lasting. He still lives in the national memory as the Marcellus the earliest Marcellus of English literature. After two centuries the poet Shelley gave voice to a faith, almost universal among Englishmen, that his varied deeds, his gentle nature, and his early death had robed him in dazzling immortality.' In Shelley's ethereal fancy 'Sidney, as he fought And as he fell, and as he lived and loved, Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,' was among the first of the inheritors of unfulfilled renown to welcome to their thrones in the empyrean the youngest of the princes of poetry, John Keats. IV SIR WALTER RALEGH 'O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!' [BIBLIOGRAPHY.-By far the best biography of Ralegh is Sir Primary cause of colonial expansion. I THE primary cause of colonial expansion lies in the natural ambition of the healthy human intellect to extend its range of vision and knowledge. Curiosity, the inquisitive desire to come to close quarters with what is out of sight, primarily accounts for the passion for travel and for exploration whence colonial movements spring. Intellectual activity is the primary cause of the colonising instinct. Three But the colonising, the exploring spirit, when once it has come into being, is invariably stimulated and kept secondary alive by at least three secondary causes, which are sometimes mistaken for the primary. In them good and bad are much tangled. The web of our life,' causes. |