“’My friends, this is Dr. Cecil, the benevolent censor of the age; and this is my sister Rosalie.  This, sir,’ addressing me, ’is the son of a man whom I have often heard you admire, Mr. Sidney;’ presenting a spare young man of good figure, whose face seemed formed on the finest model of antiquity, and whose large eye, of a soft deep blue, habitually expanded, as if looking upon a wide and boundless surface, might well be called an eye of ocean.  He advanced with mild and graceful composure, and saluted me with an unassuming modesty and politeness, blended at the same time with a manly firmness, simplicity, and dignity, which gave me the presentiment that he was a superior character.”

After describing a conversation in which Van Tromp, Reynolds, Herbert, and Sidney took part, the narrative continues: 

“But Sidney’s appeared to be the master-spirit; cool, collected, firm, vigorous, and self-balanced, he stood, like an eagle upon the rocks of Norway’s coast, defying with equal composure the storm that raved and rent the atmosphere above, and the surging element that towered and dashed and roared below.

“This young man was really a prodigy.  He was only two-and-twenty years of age; yet his information seemed already to be universal.  He spoke on every science and every art like one of its ablest professors.  There was no broken lumber nor useless trash in his mind.  The materials were all of the best sort, and in the highest order.  The stores of his knowledge had been collected with so much reflection and hypothetical application, and arranged in his memory with so much skill and method, that he would call them into use at a moment’s warning; and there was no point which he wished to illustrate by analogy, or support by a precedent, for which his memory did not supply him at once with the happiest materials.

“There were one or two important particulars in which he had a manifest and striking advantage over the generality of young men.  Where, for instance, Herbert, Reynolds, and Van Tromp had, through indolence or hurry, passed over the Gordian knots which had occurred in the course of their studies, Sidney seems to have stopped, and sitten deliberately and patiently down, resolved not to cut but to untie them before he rose, so as not only to make himself master of the knowledge which they concealed, but to discover also how the knot came to be tied; whether it arose from the unavoidable difficulty of the subject, or from the want of care or of intellectual strength in the author.  Thus he trained and practised his mind to grapple with difficulties and to subdue them; and thus he gave to his penetration a point of adamant which no difficulty could stop or turn aside.