entirely ignores. He is considering the way in which certain of the ancients met death:
. . . ils l’ont faicte couler et glisser parmy la lascheté de leurs occupations accoustumées entre des garses et bons compaignons; nul propos de consolation, nulle mention de testament, nulle affectation ambitieuse de constance, nul discours de leur condition future; mais entre les jeux, les festins, facecies, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux.
An age seems to separate Sidney from Montaigne. The English compared with the French are as boys compared with men.
But the Elizabethan prose writers, if they have the formlessness of youth, have, too, its freshness and audacity. In the same essay Sidney shapes language, masterfully and easily, to his liking; freely and naturally reaches his hand for a metaphor. To bring this prose to perfection (and Dryden’s prose is very near perfection) only the discipline of the stage was necessary and the growth of self-consciousness. It is in the plays, and especially in the comic passages of the plays, that the finest Elizabethan prose is to be found. The stage was the nursery where prose learnt to find its feet. For on the stage people had to meet, to quip and crank, to suffer interruptions, to talk of ordinary things.
Cler. A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there’s no man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days; till she has painted, and perfumed, and washed, and scoured, but the boy here; and him she wipes her oiled lips upon, like
