A worthy volume of the "Elizabethan Library" (Elliot Stock) is
The Friend of Sir Philip Sidney ; being Selections from the Works in Verse and Prose of Greville, Lord Brooke, made by Alexander B. Grosart. Mr. Grosart begins with a number of single lines, couplets, 8:4., selected from "Picked and Packed Words." Extracts of various length and treating of many subjects from both prose works and poems follow. Here is a specimen of his muse : —
"Love. the delight of all well-thinking minds; Delight, the fruit of virtue dearly loved ; Virtue, the highest good, that Reason finds ; Reason, the fire wherein men's thoughts be proved; Are from the world by Nattire's power bereft, And in our creature, for her glory, left.
Beauty her cover is, the eye's true pleasure: In Honour's forms she lives; the ear's sweet music; Rice,, of wonder grows from her true measure ; Her worth is Passion's wound and Passion's physic.
Time would fain stay that she might never leave her; Each would rejoice that she must needs contain her ; Death craves of Heaven, that she may not bereave her ; The heavens know their own, and do maintain her ; Delight, Love, Reason, Virtue, let it be, To set all women light, but only she."
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