Author: Sidney Lee

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-09

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9781331058618

Excerpt from Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century Of that lecture I have only printed a small section in this volume. I have substituted for it, by way of introduction, a sketch of the intellectual spirit which was peculiar to the sixteenth century. This preparatory essay, which is practically new, gives, I trust, increased unity to the general handling of my theme. The six men of whom I treat are all obviously, in their several ways, representative of the highest culture of sixteenth-century England, but they by no means exhaust the subject. Many other great Englishmen of the sixteenth century - statesmen like Wolsey and Burghley, theologians like Colet and Hooker, dramatists like Marlowe and Ben Jonson, men of science like William Gilbert, the electrician, and Napier of Merchiston, the inventor of logarithms - deserve association with them in any complete survey of sixteenth-century culture. In choosing five of the six names, I was moved by the fact that I had already studied, with some minuteness, their careers and work in my capacity of contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography. I wrote there the lives of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, and I collaborated with others in the biographies of Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser. I have not written at any length on Bacon before; but it is obvious that not the briefest list of great Englishmen of the sixteenth century would be worthy of attention were he excluded from it. I hope that, by presenting Bacon in juxtaposition with Shakespeare, I may do something to dispel the hallucination which would confuse the achievements of the one with those of the other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.