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At 02:21 PM 9/7/01 +0200, Harry Berger Jr. wrote: >I don't suppose this is a Sidney-Spenser sort of question, but since the >topic is republics and I'm working on Dutch stuff, I'll ask it anyway. In >the late 16th and early 17th centuries, how did the English characterize the >Dutch constitution? Were they as dismissive of the political order as they >were of the social order? I'm thinking of the member of Leicester's >entourage who described the regents as "Sovereign Lords Millers and >Cheesemen." Blair Worden has some material on this in _The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics_ (1996), pp. 229-30. According to Worden, Sidney and his circle thought the Dutch republicans (a) prone to division and (b) "tyrannous over themselves, making themselves miserable at home and despised abroad" (Dyer). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c. -----------------------------------------------------------------------