[91] Richard Hooker (1553-1600). Edition of his works (by Keble) first appeared 1836. First book of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has been edited for Clarendon Press Series by R. W. Church, 1868.
[92] Grosart, in his Life of Spenser (pp. 236-37), gives good reasons for doubting this story which is based mainly on the Jonson-Drummond interviews. Grosart also questions—as Prof. John Wilson had done before him—all the allegations of Spenser’s extreme indigence.
[93] Philip Sidney, b. 1554; d. 1586.
[94] The first edition of Rinaldo was printed at Venice in 1562: this great epic was completed at Padua in 1575.
[95] John Lyly, b. 1554; d. 1606.
[96] The style of Lyly has been traced by Dr. Landmann, an ingenious German critic, to the influence of Don Antonio de Guevara, a Spanish author, who wrote El Libro Aureo de Marco Aurelio, 1529. It was translated into English by Lord Berners in 1531 (published in 1534).
[97] James Spedding, b. 1803; d. 1881. His chief work was the Bacon life; and there is something pathetic in the thought of a man of Spedding’s attainments, honesty of purpose, and unflagging industry, devoting thirty of the best years of his life to a vindication of Bacon’s character. His aggressive attitude in respect to Macaulay is particularly shown in his Evenings with a Reviewer (2 vols., 8vo), in which he certainly makes chaff of a good deal of Macaulay’s arraignment.
[98] We are disinclined, however, to accept the same biographer’s over-mild treatment of the bribe-taking, as a “moral negligence”—coupling it with Dr. Johnson’s moral delinquency of lying a-bed in the morning! See closing pages of Evenings with a Reviewer.
[99] The extraordinary habits of Hobbes are made subject of pleasant illustrative comment in Sydney Smith’s (so-called) Sketches of Moral Philosophy, Lecture XXVI.
[100] Hobbes’ Thucydides was first published in the year 1628. An earlier English version (1550) was, in effect, only a translation of a translation, being based upon the French of Claude de Seyssel, Bishop of Marseilles. Hobbes sneers at this, and certainly made a better one—very literal, sometimes tame—sometimes vulgar, but remaining the best until the issue of Dean Smith’s (1753).