"The Discourses re-established Sidney's posthumous prestige. He would always be associated in the public mind with extreme republicanism, but he had undoubtedly suffered as a martyr in the cause of liberty, define 'liberty' how you will, and he had been a practising politician of great experience and a scion of the nobility. This lent his words an authority denied to middle-class intellectuals and journalists like Toland and Locke, and for the rest of this period his Discourses were certainly much more influential than Locke's Two Treaties. They were much less abstract and drew upon a wide range of historical analysis, and they were couched in a much superior literary style."