Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel _Rosalind_, on which Shakespeare based _As You Like It_ while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main.

This connection between life and action affected as we have seen the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing.

"All the distinguished writers of the period," says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the more modern ...

you have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read.

The little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done." In another passage the same writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better done.