'It's a question sometimes whether diamond gives more lustre to the ring it's set in, or the ring to the diamond; this gentleman received honour from his family, and gave renoun to it. Writing is the character of the speech, as that is of the mind. From Tully (whose orations he could repeat to his dying day) he gained an even and apt stile, flowing at one and the selfsame height. Tully's Offices, a book which boys read, and men understand, was so esteemed of my Lord Burleigh, that to his dying day he always carried it about him, either in his bosome or his pocket, as a compleat piece that, like Aristotle's rhetorick, would make both a scholar and an honest man. Cicero's magnificent orations against Anthony, Catiline and Verres; Cæsar's great Commentaries that he wrote with the same spirit that he fought; flowing Livy; grave, judicious and stately Tacitus; eloquent, but faithful Curtius; brief and rich Salust; prudent and brave Xenophon, whose person was Themistocles his companion, as his book was Scipio Affricanus his pattern in all his wars; ancient and sweet Herodotus; sententious and observing Thucidides; various and useful Polybius; Siculus, Halicarnasseus, Trogus, Orosius, Justine, made up our young man's retinue in all his travels where (as Diodorus the Sicilian writes) he "_sate on the stage of human life, observing the great circumstances of places, persons, times, manners, occasions, etc, and was made wise by their example who haue trod the path of errour and danger before him_." To which he added that grave, weighty and sweet Plutarch, whose books (said Gaza) would furnish the world, were all others lost. Neither was he amazed in the labyrinth of history, but guided by the clue of cosmography, hanging his study with maps, and his mind with exact notices of each place. He made in one view a judgement of the situation, interest, and commodities (for want whereof many statemen and souldiers have[74] failed) of nations; but to understand the nature of places, is but a poor knowledge, unless we know how to improue them by art; therefore under the figures of triangles, squares, circles and magnitudes, with their terms and bounds, he could contrive most tools and instruments, most engines, and judge of fortifications, architecture, ships, wind and water-works, and whatever might make this lower frame of things useful and serviceable to mankinde; which severer studies he relieved with noble and free Poetry-aid, once the pleasure and advancement of the soul, made by those higher motions of the minde more active and more large. To which I adde her sister Musick, wherewith he revived his tired spirits, lengthened (as he said) his sickly days, opened his oppressed breast, eased his melancholy thoughts, graced his happy pronunciation, ordered and refined his irregular and gross inclinations, fixed and quickened his floating and dead notions;