as
a writer, and the student is recommended to read his biography rather than
his books. His life expresses, better than any single literary work, the
two ideals of the age,--personal honor and national greatness.

As a writer he is known by three principal works, all published after his
death, showing how little importance he attached to his own writing, even
while he was encouraging Spenser. The _Arcadia_ is a pastoral romance,
interspersed with eclogues, in which shepherds and shepherdesses sing of
the delights of rural life. Though the work was taken up idly as a summer's
pastime, it became immensely popular and was imitated by a hundred poets.
The _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595), generally called the _Defense of
Poesie_, appeared in answer to a pamphlet by Stephen Gosson called _The
School of Abuse_ (1579), in which the poetry of the age and its unbridled
pleasure were denounced with Puritan thoroughness and conviction. The
_Apologie_ is one of the first critical essays in English; and though its
style now seems labored and unnatural,--the pernicious result of Euphues
and his school,--it is still one of the best expressions of the place and
meaning of poetry in any language. _Astrophel and Stella_ is a collection
of songs and sonnets addressed to Lady Penelope Devereux, to whom Sidney
had once been betrothed. They abound in exquisite lines and passages,
containing more poetic feeling and expression than the songs of any other
minor writer of the age.

GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559?-1634). Chapman spent his long, quiet life among the
dramatists, and wrote chiefly for the stage. His plays, which were for the
most part merely poems in dialogue, fell far below the high dramatic
standard of his time and are now almost unread. His most famous work is the
metrical translation of the _Iliad_ (1611) and of the _Odyssey_ (1614).
Chapman's _Homer_, though lacking the simplicity and dignity of the
original, has a force and rapidity of movement which makes it superior in
many respects to Pope's more familiar translation. Chapman is remembered
also as the finisher of Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_, in which, apart from
the drama, the Renaissance movement is seen at perhaps its highest point in
English poetry. Out of scores of long poems of the period, _Hero and
Leander_ and the _Faery Queen_ are the only two which are even slightly
known to modern readers.

MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631). Drayton is the most voluminous and, to
antiquarians at