by Mr. T.S. Eliot
For the last of his six types of Tudor prose, Mr. Eliot takes biography; and certainly no Tudor biography has such an ideal appeal as Fulke Greville's 'Life of Sir Philip Sidney.' There is no figure more attractive, from that attractive period, than Sidney, who as soldier-poet, combines in perfection the two main traits of Elizabethan character: love of physical adventure and love of mental adventure, too. As a poet he wrote some sonnets that are, Shakespeare alone excepted, the glory of that singing age; and as a soldier he typified, by his death at Zutphen, the very idea of Elizabethan chivalry. A finer subject for biography would be hard to find - if all were known about the man; but Greville wrote biography before the modern methods of particularization and exactitude had come into practice; with the result that, charming as is the renowned picture of Sidney he has given us and well-qualified as he was - by reason of his intimate friendship with Sidney, his sharing of adventures from schooldays to Sidney's death, and his agreement with Sidney's views of literature and life - to paint it, we could wish to know much more of this fine flower of Elizabethan courtiers.