"Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with plesant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden: but let those things alone and goe to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is imployed, and know whether shee have brought forth so true a lover as _Theagines_, so constant a friende as _Pilades_, so valiant a man as _Orlando_, so right a Prince as _Xenophon's Cyrus_; so excellent a man every way as _Virgil's Aeneas_...." Next for wit--roguishness, if you like the term better:-- "And therefore, if _Cato_ misliked _Fulvius_, for carrying _Ennius_ with him to the field, it may be answered, that if _Cato_ misliked it, the noble _Fulvius_ liked it, or else he had not done it." And lastly for beauty and wit combined:-- "For he (the Poet) doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he doth, as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes: that full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of Musicke: and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." "Is not this a glorious way to talk?" demanded the Rev. T.E. Brown of this last passage, when he talked about Sidney, the other day, in Mr. Henley's _New Review_. "No one can fail," said Mr. Brown, amiably assuming the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind--"no one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty _but_, the daintier _and forsooth_, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of _the chimney-corner_." Everybody admires Sidney's prose. But how of this?--