[2] Both these papers of Travers and Hooker are preserved in Hooker’s Works. Many curious points are discussed by Hooker with admirable reasoning. The divinity of Hooker, who is the firm advocate of legal authority, is enlightened and tolerant; while Travers, who advocated unrestrained personal freedom, is in his divinity narrow and merciless. He sees only “the Elect,” and he casts human nature into the flames of eternity.
[3] “A studious and cynical person, who never expected or desired more than his small preferment. He was a great admirer of Richard Hooker, and collected some of his small treatises.”—Athenæ Oxonienses.
[4] Anthony Wood has said it contained all the eight books, (followed by General Dictionary and Biographia Britannica,) and accused Gauden of pretending to publish three books for the first time in 1662.
[5] “Ecclesiastical Polity,” book First.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
Were I another Baillet, solely occupied in collecting the “jugemens des sçavans”—the decisions of the learned—the name of Sir Philip Sidney would bring forth an awful crash of criticism, rarely equalled in dissonance and confusion.
He who first ventured to pronounce a final condemnation on “The Arcadia” of Sir Philip Sidney as a “tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance,” was Horace Walpole;—a decision suited to the heartlessness which wounded the personal qualities of an heroic man, the pride of a proud age. Have modern critics too often caught the watchword when given out by an imposing character? The irregular Hazlitt honestly confides to us, in an agony of despair, that “Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste,” tormented by a conviction that a taste should be acquired. The peculiar style of this critic is at once sparkling and vehement, antithetical and metaphysical. The volcano of his criticism heaves; the short, irruptive periods clash with quick repercussion; the lava flows over his pages, till it leaves us in the sudden darkness of an hypercriticism on “the celebrated description of the ‘Arcadia.’”
Gifford, once the Coryphæus of modern criticism, whose native shrewdness admirably fitted him for a partisan, both in politics and in literature, did not deem Walpole’s depreciation of Sidney “to be without a certain degree of justice; the plan is poor, the incidents trite, the style pedantic.” But our prudential critic harbours himself in some security by confessing to “some nervous and elegant passages.”