SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

Sir Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst in 1554, and died of his wounds at the battle of Zutphen in 1586. All his work was posthumously published, but all is of a very high order as literature, the Arcadia being the chief example of its peculiar style in English, and the Defence of Poetry the earliest noteworthy piece of English criticism.

TO HIS SISTER.

O my dear Lady and Sister the Countess of Pembroke.

T°

Here have you now, most dear, and most worthy to be most dear lady! this idle work of mine; which I fear, like the spider's web, will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth, as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out, in some desert of forgetfulness, this child, which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire, to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done only for you, only to you: if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends, who will weigh errors in the balance of good will, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence; the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were, and shall be

when God will, having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster and more sorry might I be that they came in, than that they gat out. But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection, the bearing the livery of your name, which, if much good will do not deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender. This say I, because I know thy virtue so, and this say I, because it may be for ever so, or to say better, because it will be ever so.

Read it then at your idle times, and the follies your good judgment will find in it, blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuff than as in a haberdasher's shop, glasses or feathers, you will continue to love the writer, who doth exceedingly love you, and most heartily prays you may long live, to be a principal ornament to the family of the Sidneys.

Dedication to the Arcadia.

P. 19, Il. 8, 9. And this say I-ever so. This phrase, which is one of the rather indefensible jingles in which Elizabethan writers delighted, comes to little more than "and because I have no doubt of its continuance."

IN

RICHARD HOOKER.

Richard Hooker was born near Exeter in 1554. He was scholar and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, took orders, and was appointed to the cure of Drayton Beauchamp. Made Master of the Temple by Whitgift, he engaged in active controversy. He died at his living of Bishopsbourne in Kent in 1600. The first part of the Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1594.

THE SANCTIONS OF HUMAN LAW.

N laws, that which is natural bindeth universally, that which is positive not so. To let go those kind of positive laws which men impose upon themselves, as by vow unto God, contract with men, or such like; somewhat it will make unto our purpose, a little more fully to consider what things are incident unto the making of the positive laws for the government of them that live united in public society. Laws do not only teach what is good, but they enjoin it, they have in them a certain constraining force. And to constrain men unto any thing inconvenient doth seem unreasonable. Most requisite therefore it is that to devise laws which all men shall be forced to obey none but wise men be admitted. Laws are matters of principal consequence; men of common capacity and but ordinary judgment are not able,-for how should they?—to discern what things are fittest for each kind and state of regiment. We cannot be ignorant how much our obedience unto laws dependeth upon this point. Let a man though never so justly oppose himself unto them that are disordered in their ways, and what one amongst them commonly doth not stomach at such contradiction, storm at

reproof, and hate such as would reform them? Notwithstanding even they which brook it worst that men should tell them of their duties, when they are told the same by a law, think very well and reasonably of it. For why? They presume that the law doth speak with all indifferency; that the law hath no side-respect to their persons; that the law is as it were an oracle proceeded from wisdom and understanding.

Howbeit laws do not take their constraining force from the quality of such as devise them, but from that power which doth give them the strength of laws. That which we spake before concerning the power of government must here be applied unto the power of making laws whereby to govern; which power God hath over all: and by the natural law, whereunto he hath made all subject, the lawful power of making laws to command whole politic societies of men belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately and personally received from God, or else by authority derived at the first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny.

Laws they are not therefore which public approbation hath not made so. But approbation not only they give who personally declare their assent by voice, sign or act, but also when others do it in their names by right originally at the least derived from them. As in parliaments, councils, and the like assemblies, although we be not personally ourselves present, notwithstanding our assent is by reason of others, agents there in our behalf. And what we do by others, no reason but that it should stand as our deed, no less effectually to bind us than if ourselves had done it in person. In many things assent is given, they that give it not imagining they do so, because the manner of their assenting is not apparent. As for example, when an absolute monarch commandeth his subjects that which seemeth good in his own discretion, hath not his edict the force of a law whether they approve or dislike it? Again, that which hath been received long sithence and is by custom now established, we keep as a law which we may not transgress; yet what consent was ever thereunto sought or required at our hands?

Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no full and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent we could in such sort be at no man's commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.

Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

"government," as in the famous instance of Knox's

P. 20, l. 15. Regiment "monstrous regiment of women."