In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what Malory's "Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and historic romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their parts. Indeed the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable heroic French romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old Mortality," and from which Scott did not disdain to borrow a description in "Ivanhoe". It is indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon (Book I, Chap, XII.) with an actual representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked. The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout the romance. The style is less conceited than that of "Euphues," and is always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The profusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable images of virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean verse of the shepherds of Theocritus. Spenser. After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We know from his "Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London-- my most kyndly Nurse, That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse, Though from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame-- that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills. Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, but his own family must have been poor. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, was aided by the munificent Robert Nowell, and obtained a Sizarship (corresponding to the old Oxford servitorship), at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he made two friends, Gabriel Harvey, a true friend, if a rather pedantic don (the Hobbinol of his "Shepherd's Calendar"), and E. Kirke, the E. K. who furnished the notes explanatory of old English words in that poem. Spenser also gained the good graces of Grindal, then Bishop of London, later Primate, a puritan, who fell into Elizabeth's disgrace, and is applauded as Algrind by Spenser in the "Shepherd's Calendar".