;' presenting a spare
young man of good figure, whose face seemed formed on the finest model
of antiquity, and whose large eye, of a soft deep blue, habitually
expanded, as if looking upon a wide and boundless surface, might well be
called an _eye of ocean_. He advanced with mild and graceful composure,
and saluted me with an unassuming modesty and politeness, blended at the
same time with a manly firmness, simplicity, and dignity, which gave me
the presentiment that he was a superior character."

After describing a conversation in which Van Tromp, Reynolds, Herbert,
and Sidney took part, the narrative continues:

"But Sidney's appeared to be the master-spirit; cool, collected, firm,
vigorous, and self-balanced, he stood, like an eagle upon the rocks of
Norway's coast, defying with equal composure the storm that raved and
rent the atmosphere above, and the surging element that towered and
dashed and roared below.

"This young man was really a prodigy. He was only two-and-twenty years
of age; yet his information seemed already to be universal. He spoke on
every science and every art like one of its ablest professors. There was
no broken lumber nor useless trash in his mind. The materials were all
of the best sort, and in the highest order. The stores of his knowledge
had been collected with so much reflection and hypothetical application,
and arranged in his memory with so much skill and method, that he would
call them into use at a moment's warning; and there was no point which
he wished to illustrate by analogy, or support by a precedent, for which
his memory did not supply him at once with the happiest materials.

"There were one or two important particulars in which he had a manifest
and striking advantage over the generality of young men. Where, for
instance, Herbert, Reynolds, and Van Tromp had, through indolence or
hurry, passed over the Gordian knots which had occurred in the course of
their studies, Sidney seems to have stopped, and sitten deliberately and
patiently down, resolved not to cut but to untie them before he rose, so
as not only to make himself master of the knowledge which they
concealed, but to discover also how the knot came to be tied; whether it
arose from the unavoidable difficulty of the subject, or from the want
of care or of intellectual strength in the author. Thus he trained and
practised his mind to grapple with difficulties and to subdue them; and
thus he gave to his penetration a poin