VI-Biography,' 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 agreementwith Sidney's views of literature and life-to paint it, we could wish to know much more of this fine flower of Elizabethan courtiers,