Lodowick Bryskett is usually mentioned as a friend of Edmund Spenser--he may be the model for Thestylis in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), and he is referred to in Amoretti 33--or as the companion of Sir Philip Sidney on the Continent, rather than as a significant literary figure in his own right. However, his A Discourse of Civil Life (1606) merits serious study, not so much for its original content as for its importance as a medium for extending the humanist culture of Renaissance Italy into England. His contribution to the transmission of literary culture is illustrated as well by two elegies on the death of his friend Sidney, printed at the end of Astrophil in Spenser's Colin Clout: "The Mourning Muse of Thestylis" (powerfully echoed in John Milton's Lycidas, 1638) and Philip Sidney (heavily derived from Torquato Tasso's "Selva nella morte del signor Aluigi da Gonzaga" and "Alcippo"). The...