Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century. By Sidney Lee. (A.
Constable and Co. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mr. Sidney Lee, having received an invitation to give the Lowell Lectures at Boston, very wisely took advantage of the opportunity to write out at length what is really matter of fact in the biographies of certain great Englishmen of the sixteenth century,—Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare. These lectures, with an introduction, index, chronological tables, and excellent reproductions of the best portrait in each case—we like especially the side view of the Shakespeare monument—have now been issued in Messrs. Con- stable's most elegant format for readers on this side of the Atlantic, who have no less interest, by inheritance, in these great names, and may be credited, perhaps, with an equal desire to know what is known about them. It is the sense of security that Mr. Lee's readers must feel, the comfortable assurance that behind every statement there is authority, and that they are not being fobbed off with a hundredth rechauffe of ancient legends, which should ensure for the volume a wide public. One great merit of the book is the catholic sympathy it displays with minds of very different types. More, who is half mediaeval and half modern, and Shakespeare, who is the very child of the Renaissance, are both handled with appreciative insight. The only one of the biographies which has the air of taking a side is that of Bacon, whose character is so uniformly blackened as to be quite as unconvincing as Mr. Spedding's study in whitewash. In this one case Mr. Lee seems to forget the canon he himself has laid down in the introduction, that in no age did good and evil so jostle for dominion in man's soul, or rather maintain joint occupation, as in the sixteenth century. If Bacon had been the morally contemptible figure that Mr. Lee paints, he could never have left the impression on his friends that he did; for example, on Ben Jenson, no mean judge of a man. In all the biographies the shadows are put in somewhat heavily, but that is, perhaps, a fault on the right side ; and it is interesting, though not at all surprising, to find that Mr. Lee's handling through so many years of so many human lives has left the moral interest uppermost in his thought. It comes out clearly in each of these biographies. The Life of Ralegh, for example, opens with some remarks on some secondary causes of colonial expansion, which men of letters, in their glorification of the heroic achievements in the spacious days of the great Queen, are apt to leave out of sight :—
" The colonising spirit, when once it has come into being, is invariably stimulated and kept alive by at least three secondary
causes In them good and bad are much tangled. `The web of our life,' says Shakespeare, is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.' Of a very mingled yarn is the web of which colonial effort is woven. The intellectual desire to know more about the world is commonly stimulated, in the first place, by the hope of improving one's material condition, by the expectation of making more money than would be likely otherwise. Evil lurks in this expectation ; it easily degenerates into greed of gain, into the passion for gold. The desire for foreign exploration, too, is invigorated by impatience of that restraint which law or custom imposes on an old country, by the hope of greater liberty and personal independence. This hope may tempt to moral ruin. Then there emerges a third motive—the love of exercising authority over peoples of inferior civilisation or physical development. The love of mastery is capable alike of benefit- ing and of injuring humanity. If it be exercised prudently, it may serve to bring races, that would otherwise be excluded, 'within the pale of a higher civilisation ; but if it be exercised 'imprudently, it sinks to tyranny and cruelty."
It is, however, not so much in the character-drawing or in the moral reflections of the essayist that the chief distinction of Mr. Lee's biographies is to be found, but rather in the admirable marshalling of the facts. From the facts the reader will possibly feel himself competent to draw his own conclusions; but unless he can be sure of this groundwork he is without materials for forming hypotheses of any sort. Of Mr. Lee's trained faculty in compressing detail into brief and lucid compass, the Lives of
Ralegh and More are excellent examples. The biography which shows most signs of its original Transatlantic purpose is that on Shakespeare, which seems occasionally conscious of certain popular errors indigenous to that continent. Care is taken
to show that Shakespeare was a well-known personage from the year 1594, when he was sent for to Court, owing to his reputation as a dramatist. Mr. Lee is especially happy in the skill with which he brings parallel facts from con- temporary lives to bear upon events which from their supposed uniqueness in Shakespeare's case have been misinterpreted. He shows, for example, that there are no grounds for the conjecture that the Shakespearian plays must have been written by a lawyer which would not apply with even greater force to the Spenseriaii poems, where the use of law terms is both more striking and more accurate. He shows that no obscure sources for Shake- speare's wealth are needed, inasmuch as other contemporary actors made even greater fortunes. His argument that Shake- speare's schooling was good enough, because it was as good as either Marlowe's or Spenser's, is less effective, since it is open to the retort that both these poets proceeded from school to the University, whereas Shakespeare did not. A supplementary lecture deals with the Foreign Influences on Shakespeare, to which Mr. Lee has given special study. It is interesting in itself, but seems a little out of place in the volume. We have noticed one or two passages that might be reconsidered for a second edition. The criticism of the " Astrophel and Stella" sonnets as displaying an "alacrity in sinking " is calculated to make a plain person gasp. In the Life of More we do not see what is meant by saying that " with characteristic sense of humour," he made his wife learn the harp ; nor later, why it should be said that More " seemed" to speak in jest when he moved his beard from the block as "not having committed treason." The jest is surely good enough for the occasion. The beard, as we know from Stapylton, and, indeed, from Holbein's portraits, had been let grow in prison, possibly from lack of a barber; it had therefore not been con- demned in Court. Again, in the lecture on Shakespeare it is scarcely accurate to say that Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont had already "received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey"; for, as Mr. Lee himself explains in the lecture on Spenser, it was that poet's interment which " inaugurated " Poets' Corner. Chaucer had been laid there as an officer of the King's Household; and it is conceivable that Spenser's office at Court, with the fact that he died in Westminster, may have suggested the interment there in his case also. The point is one that Mr. Lee might clear up.
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