and
looking even younger than his years--"not only of an excellent wit, but
extremely beautiful of face"--with delicately chiselled Anglo-Norman
features, smooth fair cheek, a faint moustache, blue eyes, and a mass of
amber-coloured hair; such was the author of 'Arcadia' and the governor of
Flushing.

And thus an Anglo-Norman representative of ancient race had come back to
the home of his ancestors. Scholar, poet, knight-errant, finished
gentleman, he aptly typified the result of seven centuries of
civilization upon the wild Danish pirate. For among those very quicksands
of storm-beaten Walachria that wondrous Normandy first came into
existence whose wings were to sweep over all the high places of
Christendom. Out of these creeks, lagunes, and almost inaccessible
sandbanks, those bold freebooters sailed forth on their forays against
England, France, and other adjacent countries, and here they brought and
buried the booty of many a wild adventure. Here, at a later day, Rollo
the Dane had that memorable dream of leprosy, the cure of which was the
conversion of North Gaul into Normandy, of Pagans into Christians, and
the subsequent conquest of every throne in Christendom from Ultima Thule
to Byzantium. And now the descendant of those early freebooters had come
back to the spot, at a moment when a wider and even more imperial swoop
was to be made by their modern representatives. For the sea-kings of the
sixteenth century--the Drakes, Hawkinses, Frobishers, Raleighs,
Cavendishes--the De Moors, Heemskerks, Barendts--all sprung of the old
pirate-lineage, whether called Englanders or Hollanders, and instinct
with the same hereditary love of adventure, were about to wrestle with
ancient tyrannies, to explore the most inaccessible regions, and to
establish new commonwealths in worlds undreamed of by their ancestors--to
accomplish, in short, more wondrous feats than had been attempted by the
Knuts, and Rollos, Rurics, Ropers, and Tancreds, of an earlier age.

The place which Sidney was appointed to govern was one of great military
and commercial importance. Flushing was the key to the navigation of the
North Seas, ever since the disastrous storm of a century before, in which
a great trading city on the outermost verge of the island had been
swallowed bodily by the ocean. The Emperor had so thoroughly recognized
its value, as to make special mention of the necessity for its
preservation, in his private instructions to Philip, and