‘The reason why I cannot tell,
But I don’t like you, Dr. Fell.’
I must give my reasons, ‘on compulsion,’ for not speaking well of a person like Sir Philip Sidney—
‘The soldier’s, scholar’s, courtier’s eye, tongue, sword,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’
the splendour of whose personal accomplishments, and of whose wide-spread fame was, in his life time,
——‘Like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, that renders back
His figure and his heat’—
a writer too who was universally read and enthusiastically admired for a century after his death, and who has been admired with scarce less enthusiastic, but with a more distant homage, for another century, after ceasing to be read.