Born at Penshurst, Kent, 30 November 1554. Lay Rector of Whitford, Flintshire, May 1564. Educated at Shrewsbury School, November 1564 to 1568. Matriculated Christ College, Oxford, 1568. Probably took no degree. Member of Gray’s Inn, 1568. To Paris, in suite of Earl of Lincoln, May 1572. Appointed Gentleman of Bedchamber to Charles IX., with title of Baron, August 1572. Studying in Lorraine, and at Strasburg, Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Vienna, September 1572 to autumn 1573; in Italy, October 1573 to July 1574; at Vienna, July 1574 to February 1575; visited Prague and Dresden; returned to London, May 1575. Attached to Court of Queen Elizabeth. On Embassy to Germany, February to June, 1577. His masque, “The Lady of May,” performed before the Queen at Wanstead, May 1578. Friendship with Spenser begun, 1578. President of “The Areopagus,” 1578. Being temporarily out of favor at Court, spent some months in retirement at Wilton (seat of his sister, Countess of Pembroke) in 1580; returned to Court, October 1580. Steward to Bishopric of Winchester, 1580. M.P. for Kent, January 1581 to September 1585. With Duke of Anjou in Antwerp, February to March 1582. Knighted, 8 January 1583. General of the Horse, 1583. Grant of land in colony of Virginia, 1583. Married Frances Walsingham, 20 September 1583. Joint Master of Ordnance with Earl of Warwick, July 1585. Governor of Flushing and Rammekins, November 1585. Died at Arnhem, 17 October, 1586. Buried, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 16 February, 1587. Works: “The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” 1590 (later edns., “with sundry new additions of the same author,” 1598, etc.); “Syr P. S., his Astrophel and Stella,” 1591; “An Apologie for Poetry,” 1595. Posthumous: “Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and H. Languet,” ed. by S. A. Pears, 1845. Collected Poems: ed. by A. B. Grosart (2 vols.), 1873.

Personal

  To the Noble and Vertuous Gentleman, most worthy of all titles both of Learning and Chevalrie.

  To the right noble Gentleman, Master Philip Sidney Esquier, Stephan Gosson wisheth health of body, wealth of minde, rewarde of vertue, aduauncement of honour and goood successe in godly affaires.

  The return of the young gentleman, your sonne, whose message verie sufficientlie performed, and the relatinge thereof, is no less gratefully received and well liked of Her Majestie, than the honourable opinion he hath left behinde him with all the princes with whomme he had to negotiate, hathe left a most sweet savor and grateful remembraunce of his name in those parts…. There hath not been any gentleman, I am sure, these many yeres, that hathe gon through so honourable a charge with as great commendacions as he.

	Silence augmenteth griefe, writing encreaseth rage,
	Staid are my thoughts, which loved and lost, the wonder of our age,
	Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now,
	Enraged I write I know not what: dead, quick, I know not how.
	Hard hearted mindes relent, and Rigor’s tears abound,
	And Envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault she found;
	Knowledge his light hath lost, Valor hath slaine her knight:
	Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world’s delight.
	*        *        *        *        *
	A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose vertue ever shined.
	*        *        *        *        *
	He onely like himselfe, was second unto none.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.

	A king gave thee thy name; a kingly mind,—
	That God thee gave,—who found it now too dear
	For this base world, and hath resumed it near
	To sit in skies, and sort with powers divine.
	*        *        *        *        *
	What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?
	Young years for endless years, and hope unsure
	Of fortune’s gifts for wealth that still shall dure:
	O happy race, with so great praises run!
	England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
	Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
	The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;
	Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtue’s fame;
	Nations thy wit; our minds lay up thy love;
	Letters thy learning; thy loss years long to come;
	In worthy hearts sorrow hath made thy tomb;
	Thy soul and spright enrich the heavens above.
	Thy liberal heart embalmed in grateful tears,
	Young sighs, sweet sighs, sage sighs, bewail thy fall;
	Envy her sting, and spite hath left her gall;
	Malice herself a mourning garment wears.
	That day their Hannibal died, our Scipio fell,—
	Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time;
	Whose virtues, wounded by my worthless rhyme,
	Let angels speak, and heaven thy praises tell.

	All haile, therefore, O worthie Phillip immortall!
	The flowre of Sydneyes race, the honour of thy name!
	Whose worthie praise to sing my Muses not aspire,
	But sorrowfull and sad these teares to let thee fall;
	Yet wish their verses might so farre and wide thy fame
	Extend, that envies rage, nor time, might end the same.

  Gentle Sir Philip Sidney, thou knewest what belonged to a Scholler, thou knewest what paines, what toile, what travell, conduct to perfection: wel couldst thou give every Vertue his encouragement, every Art his due, every writer his desert: cause none more vertuous, witty, or learned than thy selfe.

	Within these woods of Arcadie
	He chiefe delight and pleasure tooke;
	And on the mountaine Parthenie,
	Upon the chrystall liquid brooke,
	The Muses met him ev’ry day,
	That taught him sing, to write, and say.
	*        *        *        *        *
	A sweet attractive kinde of grace,
	A full assurance given by lookes,
	Continuall comfort in a face,
	The lineaments of Gospell bookes,
	I trowe, that countenance cannot lie,
	Whose thoughts are legible in the eie.

	Sidney, the Syren of this latter Age;
	Sidney, the Blazing star of England’s glory;
	Sidney, the Wonder of the wise and sage;
	Sidney, the Subject of true Virtue’s story;
	This Syren, Star, this Wonder, and this Subject,
	Is dumb, dim, gone, and marr’d by Fortune’s Object.

	Still living Sidney, Cæsar of our land,
	Whose never daunted valure, princely minde,
	Imbellished with art and conquests hand,
	Did expleiten his high aspiring kinde
	(An eagles hart in crowes we cannot finde)
	If thou couldst live and purchase Orpheus quill,
	Our Monarches merits would exceed thy skill.

	Immortall Sidney, glory of the field
	And glory of the Muses, and their pen
	(Who equall bare the Caduce and the Shield).

  O! but Gentry now degenerates! Nobilitie is now come to be nuda relatio, a meere bare relation and nothing else. How manie Players haue I seene vpon a stage, fit indeede to be Noblemen! how many that be Noblemen, fit onely to represent them.—Why, this can Fortune do, who makes some companions of her Chariot, who for desert should be lackies to her Ladiship…. Rise, Sidney, rise! thou England’s eternall honour! Reuiue and lead the reuolting spirits of thy countreymen, against the basest foe, Ignorance. But what talke I of thee? Heauen hath not left earth thy equall: neither do I thinke that ab orbe condito, since Nature first was, any man hath beene in whom Genus and Genius met so right. Thou Atlas to all vertues! Thou Hercules to the Muses! Thou patron to the poor! Thou deservst a Quire of ancient Bardi to sing thy praises, who with their musickes melody might expresse thy soules harmonie. Were the transmigration of soules certaine—I would thy soule had flitted into my bodie or wold thou wert aliue again, that we might lead an indiuiduall life together! Thou wast not more admired at home then famous abroad; thy penne and thy sword being the Heraldes of thy Heroicke deedes.

	Th’ admired mirrour, glory of our Isle,
	Thou far-far-more than mortall man, whose stile
	Strucke more men dumbe to hearken to thy song,
	Then Orpheus Harpe, or Tuilies golden tongue.
	To him (as right) for wits deepe quintessence,
	For honour, valour, virtue, excellence,
	Be all the Garlands, crowne his toombe with Bay,
	Who spake as much as ere our tongue can say.

  Of whose Youth I will report no other wonder, but thus: That though I lived with him, and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man: with such staiedness of mind, lovely, and familiar gravity, as carried grace, and reverence above greater years. His talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind; So as even his teachers found something in him to observe, and learn, above that which they had usually read, or taught. Which eminence, by nature, and industry made his worthy Father stile Sir Philip in my hearing (though I unseen) Lumen familiæ suæ.

  For his education, it was such as travell, and the University could afford, or his Tutours infuse; for after an incredible proficiency in all the species of Learning: he left the Academicall life, for that of the Court, whither he came by his Uncles invitation, famed afore-hand by a noble report of his accomplishments, which together with the state of his person, framed by a naturall propension to Armes, he soon attracted the good opinion of all men, and was so highly prized in the good opinion of the Queen, that she thought the Court deficient without him: And whereas (through the fame of his deserts) he was in the election for the Kingdom of Pole, she refused to further his advancement, not out of emulation, but out of fear to lose the jewell of her times.

  Sir Philip Sydney, knight, was the most accomplished cavalier of his time…. He was not only of an excellent witt, but extremely beautifull; he much resembled his sister, but his haire was not red, but a little inclining, viz. a darke amber colour. If I were to find a fault in it, methinkes ’tis not masculine enough: yett he was a person of great courage.

  No man seems to me so astonishing an object of temporary admiration as the celebrated friend of the lord Brooke, the famous Sir Philip Sidney. The learned of Europe dedicated their works to him; the republic of Poland thought him at least worthy to be in the nomination for their crown. All the muses of England wept his death. When we, at this distance of time, inquire what prodigious merits excited such admiration, what do we find? Great valour.—But it was an age of heroes.—In full of all other talents, we have a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through; and some absurd attempts to fetter English verse in Roman chains; a proof that this applauded author understood little of the genius of his own language. The few of his letters extant are poor matters; one to a steward of his father, an instance of unwarrantable violence. By far the best presumption of his abilities (to us who can judge only by what we see) is a pamphlet published amongst the Sidney papers, being an answer to the famous libel called “Leicester’s Commonwealth.” It defends his uncle with great spirit. What had been said in derogation to their blood seems to have touched sir Philip most. He died with the rashness of a volunteer, having lived to write with the sang-froid and prolixity of mademoiselle Scuderi.

	Sidney here was born;
	Sidney, than whom no gentler, braver man
	His own delightful genius ever feigned,
	Illustrating the vales of Arcady
	With courteous courage and with loyal loves.
	Upon his natal day, an acorn here
	Was planted: it grew up a stately oak,
	And in the beauty of its strength it stood
	And flourished, when his perishable part
	Had mouldered, dust to dust. That stately oak
	Itself hath mouldered now, but Sidney’s fame
	Endureth in his own immortal works.

  The life of Sir Philip Sydney was poetry put into action.

	… Sidney, as he fought
	And as he fell and as he lived and loved
	Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot.

  The noble images, passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all over the “Arcadia” (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him.

  Was the idol of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had traveled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. He combined the wisdom of a grave councilor with the romantic chivalry of a knight-errant.

  Sidney was prompt and rapid in mental movement; he formed opinions and translated them into action with great alacrity. In the very typical case of his quarrel with Lord Oxford we find him keeping his head when most men would have lost it from sheer rage; but it was all that the Queen and the Privy Council could do to prevent him from having the Earl’s blood. Unquestionably he looked mild; he had a girlish face of pink and white; and Oxford, no doubt, did not know his man when he dared to bully him. But there was wiry fibre in Sidney’s mind and body, and we may be sure that, in those fighting days, no mere carpet-knight would have impressed himself on the popular mind as a hero. His extraordinary ability in all the diplomatic arts is quite beyond dispute. To be a diplomatist, a man must possess sympathy, and have a rare judgment in the use of it. The ideal diplomatist, like the ideal poet, is a man in whom the masculine and feminine qualities of the intellect balance one another with absolute harmony, each supplying the wants of the other side of the character. What is related of Sidney tends to prove that he possessed this equilibrium to a very extraordinary degree, and I take it to have been the secret of his charm and of his power.

  The real difficulty of painting an adequate portrait of Sidney at the present time is that his renown transcends his actual achievement. Neither his poetry nor his prose, nor what is known about his action, quite explains the singular celebrity which he enjoyed in his own life, and the fame which has attended his memory with almost undimmed lustre through three centuries…. Few spirits so blameless, few so thoroughly prepared to enter upon new spheres of activity and discipline, have left this earth. The multitudes who knew him personally, those who might have been jealous of him, and those who owed him gratitude, swelled one chorus in praise of his natural goodness, his intellectual strength and moral beauty. We who study his biography, and dwell upon their testimony to his charm, derive from Sidney the noblest lesson bequeathed by Elizabethan to Victorian England.

  Englishmen, everywhere, are proud of this fine gentleman, Sidney, who can talk in so many languages, who can turn a sonnet to a lady’s eyebrow, who can fence with the best swordsmen of any court, who can play upon six instruments of music, who can outdance even his Grace of Anjou.

Arcadia

  Read the Countesse of Pembrookes Arcadia, a gallant Legendary, full of pleasurable accidents, and profitable discourses; for three thinges especially, very notable; for amorous Courting, (he was young in yeeres;) for sage counselling, (he was ripe in iudgement;) and for valorous fighting, (his soueraine profession was Armes:) and delightfull pastime by way of Pastorall exercises, may passe for the fourth. He that will Looue, let him learn to looue of him, that will teach him to Liue; & furnish him with many pithy, and effectuall instructions, delectably interlaced by way of proper descriptions of excellent Personages, and common narrations of other notable occurrences…. Liue ever sweete Booke; the siluer Image of his gentle witt, and the golden Pillar of his noble courage: and euer notify vnto the worlde, that thy Writer, was the Secretary of Eloquence; the breath of the Muses; the hooneybee of the dayntiest flowers of Witt, and Arte; the Pith of morall, & intellectuall Vertues; the arme of Bellona in the field; the toung of Suada in the chāber; the spirite of Practise in esse; and the Paragon of Excellency in Print.

  Sir Philip Sidney writ his immortal poem, The Countess of Pembroke’s “Arcadia” in prose, and yet our rarest poet.

  Besides its excellent language, rare contrivances, and delectable stories, hath in it all the strains of poesy, comprehendeth the universal art of speaking, and, to them who can discern and will observe, affordeth notable rules for demeanour both private and public.

  Merely the desire of understanding so rare a book caused me to go to England, where I remained for two years in order to gain a knowledge of it.

  Those that knew him well will truly confess it to be, both in form and matter, much inferior to that unbounded spirit of his, as the industry and images of other men’s works are many times raised above the writers’ capacities; and besides acknowledge that however he could not choose but give them aspersions of spirit and learning from the father, yet that they were scribbled rather as pamphlets for the entertainment of time and friends than any account of himself to the world; because, if his purpose had been to leave his memory in books, I am confident, in the right use of logic, philosophy, history and poesie, nay, even in the most ingenious and mechanical arts, he would have showed such tracts of a searching and judicious spirit as the professors of every faculty would have striven no less for him than the seven cities did to have Homer of their sept; but the truth is, his end was not writing, even while he wrote, nor his knowledge moulded for tables and schools,—but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great.

Sidney, warbler of poetic prose.

  It would be an easier, though a less moral, task, to praise, than to read, four hundred and eighty-six, close printed, folio pages of such mawkish writing as this. It is singular that so gallant and distinguished a personage as sir Philip Sidney, should have written a work of these dimensions, so near to the being utterly void of all genuine passion and manly spirit. To read this performance, one would think that our ancestors who admired it, had a blood that crept more feebly in their veins than we have, and that they were as yet but half awaked from the stupidity of the savage state, or, what has been called, the state of nature.

  What can be more unpromising at first sight, than the idea of a young man disguising himself in woman’s attire, and passing himself off for a woman among women; and that for a long space of time? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that neither does Pyrocles’ manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished when the deception comes to be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of Sir Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome meditation could find a harbour. He turned all that he touched into images of honour and virtue.

  There are passages in this work exquisitely beautiful,—useful observations on life and manners, a variety and accurate discrimination of characters, fine sentiments, expressed in strong and adequate terms, animated descriptions, equal to any that occur in the ancient or modern poets, sage lessons of morality, and judicious reflections on government and policy. A reader who takes up the volume may be compared to a traveller who has a long and dreary road to pass. The objects that successively meet his eye may not in general be very pleasing, but occasionally he is charmed with a more beautiful prospect, with the verdure of a rich valley, with a meadow enamelled with flowers, with a murmur of a rivulet, the swelling grove, the hanging rock, the splendid villa. These charming objects abundantly compensate for the joyless regions he has traversed. They fill him with delight, exhilarate his drooping spirits, and, at the decline of day, he reposes with complacency and satisfaction.

  Extremely tiresome, and its chief interest consists in the stately dignity, and often graceful beauty, of the language.

  Sir Philip Sydney’s “Arcadia,” the immortality of which was so fondly predicted by his admirers, and which, in truth, is full of noble thoughts, delicate images, and graceful turns of language, is now scarcely ever mentioned.

  Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said, “he could not love the French Republic”—so I may say, that I cannot love the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” with all my good-will to it…. It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time, which are grown obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic; not poetry, but casuistry; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author’s mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and maliciously in order to aggrandise our idea of himself…. Every page is “with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er;” his muse is tattooed and tricked out like an Indian goddess. He writes a court-hand, with flourishes like a schoolmaster; his figures are wrought in chain-stitch. All his thoughts are forced and painful births, and may be said to be delivered by the Cæsarean operation. At last, they become distorted and rickety in themselves; and before they have been cramped and twisted and swaddled into lifelessness and deformity…. Is spun with great labour out of the author’s brains, and hangs like a huge cobweb over the face of Nature!

  Enjoying for above a century a popularity which may well be compared with that of the “Diana” of Montemayor, if indeed, it did not equal it.

  It would be mere pretence to say that the romance could be read through now by any one not absolutely Sidney-smitten in his tastes, or that, compared with the books which we do read through, it is not intolerably languid. It is even deficient in those passages of clear incisive thought which we find in the author’s “Essay on Poetry.” No competent person, however, can read any considerable portion of it without finding it full of fine enthusiasm and courtesy, of high sentiment, of the breath of a gentle and heroic spirit. There are sweet descriptions in it, pictures of ideal love and friendship, dialogues of stately moral rhetoric. In style there is a finish, an attention to artifice, a musical arrangement of cadence, and occasionally a richness of phrase, for which English Prose at that time might well have been grateful. Seeing, too, that the complaints of wearisomeness which we bring against the book now, were not so likely to be made at the time of its publication, when readers had not been taught impatience by a surfeit of works of the same class—seeing, in fact, that the book was so popular as to go through ten editions in the course of fifty years—I am disposed to believe that this last merit was not the least important.

  The form of the “Arcadia,” it must be confessed, is somewhat fantastic, and the story tedious; but the work is still so sound at the core, so pure, strong, and vital in the soul that animates it, and so much inward freshness and beauty are revealed the moment we pierce its outward crust of affectation, that no changes in the fashions of literature have ever been able to dislodge it from its eminence of place.

  This kind of books shows only the externals, the current elegance and politeness, the jargon of the world of culture,—in short, that which should be spoken before ladies; and yet we perceive from it the bent of the general spirit.

  It was not a studied work, but as the story came he wrote it down on loose sheets of paper, most of it whilst his sister was beside him, and some of it as he rode or hunted over Salisbury Plain. Many of the descriptions of rural scenery he took from scenes he saw before him at Wilton. He did not finish it at Wilton, but took it up again at different times, and sent off the sheets as soon as written to his sister. The want of plan makes the story long and unartistic; perhaps Sidney was aware of this, as he never wished it to be published; but after his death, his sister thought it too rare to be lost to the world, and for some time it was a very popular book, many persons finding great delight in the complicated adventures of the various characters.

  The student of English fiction would fain linger long over the pages which describe the loves of Pamela and Philoclea. For when these pages are laid aside, it is long before he may again meet with the poetry, the manly and womanly sentiment, and the pure yet stirring passion which adorn the romance of Elizabeth’s Philip. Three centuries have passed away since the “Arcadia” was written, and we who live at the end of this period not unjustly congratulate ourselves on our superior civilization and refinement. And yet in all this time we have arrived of no higher conception of feminine virtue or chivalrous manhood than is to be found in this sixteenth-century romance, and during one-half of these three hundred years there was to be seen so little trace of such a conception, whether in life or in literature, that the word love seemed to have lost its nobler meaning and to stand for no more than animal desire. There is not in English fiction a more charming picture of feminine modesty than that of Pamela hiding her love for Musidorus.

  Sidney has, among several others, created one character which, forgotten as it is now, would be enough to give a permanent interest to this too much neglected romance; it is the Queen Gynecia, who is consumed by a guilty love, and who is the worthy contemporary of the strongly passionate heroes of Marlowe’s plays. With her, and for the first time, the dramatic power of English genius leaves the stage and comes to light in the novel; it was destined to pass into it entirely.

  “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia” resembles a beautiful and elaborate headgear such as Sidney’s sister might have worn at Court while witnessing his prowess at the barriers—a product of nature interspersed with a hundred quaint artifices of wreaths and bugles and ouches and rings.

  The “Arcadia,” in fact, is in some sort a halfway house between the older romances of chivalry and the long-winded “heroic” romances of the seventeenth century. Action and adventure are already giving way to the description of sentiment, or are remaining merely as a frame on which the diverse-coloured flowers of sentiment may be broidered.

Astrophel and Stella

  Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella” consists of a number of sonnets, which have been unaccountably passed over by Dr. Drake, and all our other critics who have written on this subject. Many of them are eminently beautiful.

  Sidney’s sonnets—I speak of the best of them—are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton in his compositions of a similar structure…. They are struck full of amorous fancies—far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved…. I confess I can see nothing of the “jejune” or “frigid” in them; much less of the “stiff” and “cumbrous”—which I have sometimes heard objected to the “Arcadia.” The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to “trampling horses’ feet.”

  The Stella of Sydney’s poetry, and the Philoclea of his “Arcadia,” was the Lady Penelope Devereux, the elder sister of the favourite Essex. While yet in her childhood, she was the destined bride of Sidney, and for several years they were considered as almost engaged to each other: it was natural, therefore, at this time, that he should be accustomed to regard her with tenderness and unreproved admiration, and should gratify both by making her the object of his poetical raptures. She was also less openly, but even more ardently, loved by young Charles Blount, afterwards Lord Mountjoy, who seems to have disputed with Sidney the first place in her heart. She is described as a woman of exquisite beauty, on a grand and splendid scale; dark sparkling eyes; pale brown hair; a rich vivid complexion; a regal brow and a noble figure…. A dark shade steals, like a mildew, over this bright picture of beauty, poetry, and love, even while we gaze upon it. The projected union between Sydney and Lady Penelope was finally broken off by their respective families, for reasons which do not appear. Sir Charles Blount offered himself, and was refused, though evidently agreeable to the lady; and she was married by her guardians to Lord Rich, a man of talents and integrity, but most disagreeable in person and manners, and her declared aversion.

  It is rather a singular circumstance, that, in her own and her husband’s lifetime, this ardent courtship of a married woman should have been deemed fit for publication. Sidney’s passion seems indeed to have been unsuccessful, but far enough from being Platonic. “Astrophel and Stella” is too much disfigured by conceits, but it is in some places very beautiful.

  In a certain depth and chivalry of feeling—in the rare and noble quality of disinterestedness (to put it in one word),—he has no superior, hardly perhaps an equal, amongst our Poets; and after or beside Shakespeare’s “Sonnets,” his “Astrophel and Stella” … offers the most intense and powerful picture of the passion of love in the whole range of our poetry.

  Penelope Devereux, daughter to his old friend the late Earl of Essex, had once been talked of as his own possible wife. Her father said that he would have been proud of Philip Sidney for a son-in-law. And if so why had the match not taken place? If Sidney had been really devoted to the lady he could have married her. He did not marry her because he did not wish to do so, and in his own day no reasonable being ever supposed that he paid suit to her, except in the way of verse…. Philip Sidney was an old friend of her father’s, and he gave her the place of honour in his sonnet-writing, wherein she was to be Stella (“the Star”), he Astrophel (“the Lover of the Star”); and certainly, as all the court knew, and as the forms of such ingenious love-poetry implied, so far as love in the material sense was concerned, with as much distance between them as if she had shone upon him from above the clouds. Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella” sonnets were being written at the time when he was about to marry Fanny Walsingham; and in those earnest Elizabethan days, at the fitfully strict court of Elizabeth, since the character of such poetical love-passions was then understood, they brought upon Sidney’s credit not a breath of censure. As for Lady Rich, she gave herself to Sir Christopher Blount, who became Lord Mountjoy in 1600, and after divorce from her husband she married him. But that was a real passion, and what each felt in it was not told for the amusement of the public.

  Now if you don’t like these love-songs, you either have never been in love, or you don’t know good writing from bad, (and likely enough both the negatives, I’m sorry to say, in modern England).

  “Stella” has “for all time” taken her place in the heaven of Literature beside not merely the Geraldine of Surrey earlier, or the Mary of Robert Burns later, but with the Laura of Petrarch, and Beatrice of Dante, and Rosalind and Elizabeth of Spenser, and Celia of Carew, and Castara of Habington, and Leonora of Milton, and Sacharissa of Waller.

  As a series of sonnets the “Astrophel and Stella” poems are second only to Shakespeare’s; as a series of love-poems they are perhaps unsurpassed. Other writers are sweeter, more sonorous; no other love-poet of the time is so real. The poems to Stella are steeped throughout in a certain keen and pungent individuality which leaves a haunting impression behind it. They represent, not a mere isolated mood, whether half-real like Daniel’s passion for Delia, or wholly artificial like the mood of Thomas Watson’s “Passions,” but a whole passage in a genuine life…. Not that “Astrophel and Stella” is without its make-believes. It has its “conceits,” its pieces of pure word-play, in the common Elizabethan manner. No writer in the full tide of literary fashion like Sidney could afford to neglect these. But it would be scarcely fanciful to say that even in the most clearly marked of what one may call his conceited sonnets, the true Sidneian note to a reader who has learnt to catch it is almost always discernible, a note of youth and eagerness easily felt but hard to be described.

  The lover of Penelope Rich certainly did not find his “heart’s desires” in wedlock. He chose to find his high ideal of a woman in his married sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and gave his romantic imagination free scope in writing her “Arcadia.” When he had been two years married, and just before he became a father, he was burning to visit the ends of the earth with Drake. Then he passed over to the Continent, and perished, the high-souled victim of his own rash enterprise—Argalus, but without a Parthenia. Dame Frances Sidney, strangely enough, married again, Robert, second Earl of Essex, the brother in arms and affection of her late husband. Their son Robert was the famous general of the Parliament, first husband of the aristocratic adulteress and murderess, Frances Howard.

  It is of the smallest possible importance or interest to a rational man to discover what was the occasion of Sidney’s writing these charming poems—the important point is their charm. And in this respect (giving heed to his date and his opportunities of imitation) I should put Sidney third to Shakespere and Spenser.

An Apologie for Poetrie

  The stormie Winter (deere Chyldren of the Muses) which hath so long held backe the glorious Sunshine of diuine Poesie, is heere by the sacred pen-breathing words of diuine Sir Philip Sidney, not onely chased from our fame-inuiting Clyme, but vtterly for euer banisht eternitie: then graciously regreet the perpetuall spring of euer-growing inuention, and like kinde Babes, either enabled by wit or power, help to support me poore Midwife, whose daring aduenture, hath deliuered from Obliuions wombe, this euer-to-be admired wits miracle. Those great ones, who in themselues haue interr’d this blessed innocent, wil with Aejculapius condemne me as a detractor from their Deities: those who Prophet-like haue but heard presage of his coming, wil (if they wil doe wel) not onely defend, but praise mee, as the first publique bewrayer of Poesies Messias. Those who neither haue seene, thereby to interre, nor heard, by which they might be inflamed with desire to see, let them (of duty) plead to be my Champions, sith both theyr sight and hearing, by mine incurring blame is seasoned. Excellent Poesie, (so created by this Apologie,) be thou my Defendresse; and if any wound mee, let thy beautie (my soules Adamant) recure mee: if anie commend mine endeuored hardiment, to them commend thy most diuinest fury as a winged incouragement; so shalt thou have deuoted to thee, and to them obliged.

  I have been blamed for not mentioning sir Philip’s “Defence of Poetry,” which some think his best work. I had indeed forgot it when I wrote this article; a proof that I at least did not think it sufficient foundation for so high a character as he acquired. This was all my criticism pretended to say, that I could not conceive now a man, who in some respects written dully and weakly, and who, at most, was far inferior to our best authors, had obtained such immense reputation. Let his merits and his fame be weighed together, and then let it be determined whether the world has overvalued, or I undervalued, sir Philip Sidney.

  Sir Philip Sidney is said to have miscarried in his essays; but his miscarriage was no more than that of failing in an attempt to introduce a new fashion. The failure was not owing to any defect or imperfection in the scheme, but to the want of taste, to the irresolution and ignorance of the public.

  The “Defense of Poesy” has already been reckoned among the polite writings of the Elizabethan age, to which class it rather belongs than to that of criticism; for Sidney rarely comes to any literary censure, and is still farther removed from any profound philosophy. His sense is good, but not ingenious, and the declamatory tone weakens its effect.

  The book on which Sidney’s reputation as an English classic writer rests.

  It is not only an earnest and persuasive argument, but was, in style and diction, the best secular prose yet written in England, and indeed the earliest specimen of real critical talent in the literature.

  Is worthy of a writer who had a poet’s phantasy and a critic’s delicacy of discrimination.

  The elegant and too-little known treatise…. The only pages of his “Apologie for Poetrie” generally quoted, are those in which he laughs at the playwrights of his time for violating the unities of time and place. The drawback to this isolated quotation is that it gives the perfectly false notion of Sir Philip Sidney that he was a narrow-minded pedant, whereas, in reality, there was nowhere to be found a more liberal and delicately cultured mind than his. His criticism was founded upon the noblest philosophy of art, and amongst the numerous treatises on poetry, which form an entire and very curious branch of literature in the sixteenth century, that of Sir Philip Sidney is in every respect the most remarkable. In addition to the learning of a Scaliger, and the enthusiasm of a Ronsard, he possessed a quality that both these men were lacking in, which, for want of a better word, I must call an atticism, or, more strictly speaking, an urbanity, taking care to retain the especial meaning of a graceful and witty raillery, which is contained in the Latin word but not to the same degree in the Greek.

  Sidney’s flawless “Defense of Poesie.”

  From its historical position Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy” is an important work in the development of English criticism. It is one of those inquiries into the nature of poetry that have appealed to philosophical curiosity from classical times down to our own, and that are interesting and suggestive, even if not of the most valuable order. Sidney’s work is especially noteworthy as a landmark in the evolution of English prose, and as an indication of the classical spirit of the circle to which he belonged. For he writes more as a student than as an alert contemporary of the men of 1580; he was scholastically blind to the signs of the times. Fortunately Marlowe and Shakspere did not take the essay as a literary guide. Yet for a professed classicist, Sidney is not narrow, as his love for English ballads indicates, and his pure and ideal spirit is shown in the serious ethical conception of poetry that marks his entire work.

  The monument of the noblest phase of perhaps the noblest movement of English thought. Filled with a longing for perfection, but a perfection beyond the thought of any but a poet, Sidney gives us the poetry rather than the art or the theory of criticism.

  His “Defence of Poesy” is a veritable epitome of the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance; and so thoroughly is it imbued with this spirit, that no other work, Italian, French, or English, can be said to give so complete and so noble a conception of the temper and the principles of Renaissance criticism.

General

  Our English Petrarch.

	Liberal Sidney, famous for the love
	He bare to learning and to chivalry.

	… he could pipe, and daunce, and caroll sweet,
	Emongst the shepheards in their shearing feast;
	As Somers larke that with her song doth greet
	The dawning day forth comming from the East.
	And layes of love he also could compose:
	Thrise happie she, whom he to praise did chose!

  Oh, for some excellent pen-man to deplore their state: but he which would lively, naturally, or indeed poetically, delyneate or enumerate these occurrents, shall either lead you thereunto by a poeticall spirit, as could well, if well he might, the dead-living, life-giving Sydney, Prince of Poesie.

	That poets are far rarer births than kings,
	Your noblest father proved; like whom, before,
	Or then, or since, about our Muses’ springs,
	Came not that soul exhausted so their store.

  The King said Sir P. Sidney was no poet.

	The noble Sidney …
	That hero for numbers, and for prose,
	That thoroughly pac’d our language, as to show
	The plenteous English hand in hand might go
	With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce
	Our tongue from Lilly’s writing then in use.

  The true spirit or vein of ancient poetry in this kind seems to shine most in Sir Philip Sidney, whom I esteem both the greatest poet and the noblest genius of any that have left writings behind them, and published in ours or any other modern language; a person born capable not only of forming the greatest ideas, but of leaving the noblest examples, if the length of his life had been equal to the excellence of his wit and virtues.

	Love’s foe profess’d! why dost thou falsely feign
	Thyself a Sidney? from which noble strain
	He sprung, that could so far exalt the name
	Of Love, and warm a nation with his flame;
	That all we can of love or high desire
	Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney’s fire.

	Philip and Alexander both in one;
	Heir to the Muses, the Son of Mars in Truth,
	Learning, Valour, Wisdome, all in virtuous youth,
	His praise is much, this shall suffice my pen,
	That Sidney dy’d ’mong most renown’d of men.

	Sidneian showers
	Of sweet discourse, whose powers
	Can crown old winter’s head with flowers.

	Nor can the Muse the gallant Sidney pass,
	The plume of war! with early laurels crown’d,
	The lover’s myrtle, and the poet’s bay.

Sidney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet.

  Had Sir Philip paid an exclusive attention to the poetical art, there is every reason to suppose that he would have occupied a master’s place in this department; as it is, his poetry, though too often vitiated by an intermixture of antithesis and false wit, and by an attempt to introduce the classic metres, is still rich with frequent proofs of vigour, elegance, and harmony.

  Though we cannot admit for a moment that the poetry of Sidney is debased by the vile alloy of licentiousness and pruriency, we are not blind to many other vices with which it may most justly be charged. Our author was styled, by Raleigh, the English Petrarch; and without doubt he derived many of his faults as well as excellencies from the bard of Arezzo, whom he frequently imitated both in his manner and in his exaggerated turn of expression. It was from this foreign prototype that he was probably smitten with the love of antithesis and conceit, and the other fashionable absurdities in which our best writers of sonnets then abounded.

  Penshurst, when I first saw it (in 1791), was the holiest ground I had ever visited. Forty years have not abated my love and veneration for Sydney. I do not remember any character more nearly without reproach. His prose is full of poetry; and there are very fine passages among his poems,—distinguishing them from his metres, in which there is scarcely even a redeeming line, thought, or expression.

  The truth is, that the life of Sidney is more poetical than his works; the whole tenor of his conduct is romance brought into action; and we insensibly transfer the admiration we feel for his warm humanity and his nobleness of soul, to works, which, except as they are tinged with the poetry of his character, possess little literary value.

	The silver speech
	Of Sidney’s self, the starry paladin,
	Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in
	The knights to tilt,—wert thou to hear!

  There is hardly a character in history upon which the imagination can dwell with more unalloyed delight. Not in romantic fiction was there ever created a more attractive incarnation of martial valour, poetic genius, and purity of heart.

  In the world of letters, then, Sir Philip Sidney took, for his years, rank singularly high. But we must never forget that literature was his only amusement. He knew that he had statesmanly and martial powers, which he was eager to be using. He longed, with the wild earnestness of a caged bird, for room to take his part in the great battle of freedom which was going on around him. For such work he was best fitted, and it is for the glorious beginning made by him herein that we owe him largest honour. But, knowing this, we can only the more marvel that the songs with which he lightened his captivity were so eloquent, and that the truths which his youth enforced in idle moments came out of the depths of so mature a mind.

  His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh’s, being less condensed and stately. It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his friend Spenser entertained when young; but there is often an exquisite art in his other poems.

  Sir Philip Sidney, born the year after him, with a keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emancipated than his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps even more directly influential in educating the taste and refining the vocabulary of his contemporaries and immediate successors. The better of his pastoral poems in the “Arcadia” are, in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes strains the shepherd’s pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such themes. He recognized the distinction between simplicity and vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always appropriate and never obsolete, namely, the very best. With the single exception of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting classical metres to English verse are more successful than those of his contemporaries. Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own Catullian Hendecasyllabics.

  Sidney, the radiant “Hesper-Phosphor” of the time of Elizabeth, fades in the brightness of that great morning, yet no radiance that follows is quite so clear and keen. He charmed by a sweet youthful gravity underlying a sweet youthful joyousness of nature…. He belonged heartily to the Renaissance, introducing into our prose literature the chivalric-pastoral romance, and engaging eagerly in the reform of versification and in the criticism of poetry.

  Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his intellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows and abstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely nor listened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than a brilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluency and sweetness have not improved with years.

	Music bright as the soul of light, for wings an eagle, for notes a dove,
	Leaps and shines from the lustrous lines wherethrough thy soul from afar above
	Shone and sang till the darkness rang with light whose fire is the fount of love.
	Love that led thee alive, and fed thy soul with sorrows and joys and fears,
	Love that sped thee, alive and dead, to fame’s fair goal with thy peerless peers,
	Feeds the flame of they quenchless name with light that lightens the rayless years.

  The sharper lyrical cry, the strenuous utterance of brief but deep emotion, first comes from Sidney, as in the sonnet beginning:

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust.

After this the way is open to all comers, and the full choir of song is heard in the land.

  Sidney is the most dramatic of sonneteers. In this capacity Shakespeare and he change places.