This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the Elizabethans and of Walter Scott; which guides him toward Hakluyt and North. Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E. Henley. Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was a good critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it is neither as Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland. Because he belongs to this type, Wyndham wrote enthusiastically and well about North’s Plutarch. The romance of the ancient world becomes more romantic in the idiomatic prose of North; the heroes are not merely Greek and Roman heroes, but Elizabethan heroes as well; the romantic fusion allured Wyndham. The charms of North could not be expounded more delightfully, more seductively, with more gusto, than they are in Wyndham’s essay. He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the “dead sound” of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering from his litter; he appreciates the sharp brusque phrase of North: “he roundly trussed them up and hung them by their necks.” And Wyndham is learned. Here, as in his essays on the Pléiade and Shakespeare, the man has read everything, with a labour that only whets his enjoyment of the best. There are two defects: a lack of balance and a lack of critical profundity. The lack of balance peeps through Wyndham’s condemnation of an obviously inferior translation of Plutarch: “He dedicated the superfluity of his leisure to enjoyment, and used his Lamia,” says the bad translator. North: “he took pleasure of Lamia.” Wyndham makes a set upon the bad translator. But he forgets that “dedicated the superfluity of his leisure” is such a phrase as Gibbon would have warmed to life and wit, and that a history, in the modern sense, could not be written in the style of North. Wyndham forgets, in short, that it is not, in the end, periods and traditions but individual men who write great prose. For Wyndham is himself a period and a tradition. The lack of balance is to be suspected elsewhere. Wyndham _likes_ the best, but he likes a good deal. There is no conclusive evidence that he realized all the difference, the gulf of difference between lines like: En l’an trentiesme de mon aage Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues; and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay, such as: Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame; Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.