SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.  Among the prose writers of this wonderful literary age there are many others that deserve passing notice, though they fall far below the standard of Bacon and Hooker.  Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), who has already been considered as a poet, is quite as well known by his prose works, Arcadia, a pastoral romance, and the Defense of Poesie, one of our earliest literary essays.  Sidney, whom the poet Shelley has eulogized, represents the whole romantic tendency of his age; while Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618) represents its adventurous spirit and activity.  The life of Raleigh is an almost incomprehensible mixture of the poet, scholar, and adventurer; now helping the Huguenots or the struggling Dutch in Europe, and now leading an expedition into the unmapped wilds of the New World; busy here with court intrigues, and there with piratical attempts to capture the gold-laden Spanish galleons; one moment sailing the high seas in utter freedom, and the next writing history and poetry to solace his imprisonment.  Such a life in itself is a volume far more interesting than anything that he wrote.  He is the restless spirit of the Elizabethan Age personified.

Raleigh’s chief prose works are the Discoverie of Guiana, a work which would certainly have been interesting enough had he told simply what he saw, but which was filled with colonization schemes and visions of an El Dorado to fill the eyes and ears of the credulous; and the History of the World, written to occupy his prison hours.  The history is a wholly untrustworthy account of events from creation to the downfall of the Macedonian Empire.  It is interesting chiefly for its style, which is simple and dignified, and for the flashes of wit and poetry that break into the fantastic combination of miracles, traditions, hearsay, and state records which he called history.  In the conclusion is the famous apostrophe to Death, which suggests what Raleigh might have done had he lived less strenuously and written more carefully.

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 star-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!

JOHN FOXE (1516-1587).  Foxe will be remembered always for his famous Book of Martyrs, a book that our elders gave to us on Sundays when we were young, thinking it good discipline for us to afflict our souls when we wanted to be roaming the sunlit fields, or when in our enforced idleness we would, if our own taste in the matter had been consulted, have made good shift to be quiet and happy with Robinson Crusoe.  So we have a gloomy memory of Foxe, and something of a grievance, which prevent a just appreciation of his worth.