personal friend, Francis Flower, with an epistle to the reader by Thomas Nash (doubtless the editor of the volume), and an appendix of 'sundry other rare sonnets by diuers noblemen and gentlemen.' Sidney's friends in September 1591 appealed to Lord Burghley to procure the suppression of this unauthorised venture (cf. ARBER, Stationers' Registers, i. 555). A month later, apparently, another unauthorised publisher, Matthew Lownes, issued an independent edition, a copy of which, said to be unique, is in the Bodleian Library. Finally Newman, at the solicitation of Sidney's friends, reissued his volume in 1591 without the prefatory matter and with many revisions of the text (cf. copy in Brit. Mus.). The poems were again reprinted with the authorised edition of the 'Arcadia' in 1598. There they underwent a completer recension; an important sonnet (xxxviii), attacking Lord Rich by name, and two songs (viii and ix) were added for the first time, and the songs, which had hitherto followed the sonnets en bloc, were distributed among them. This volume of 1598 also supplied for the first time 'certaine sonets of Sir Philip Sidney never before printed,' among which was the splendid lyric entitled 'Love's dirge,' with the refrain 'Love is dead,' which gives Sidney a high place among lyric poets. The sonnets were reprinted from Newman's two editions of 1591 by Mr. Arber in his 'English Garner,' i. 493 sq. With the songs and the 'Defence of Poesie,' they were edited by William Gray (Oxford, 1829), and by Dr. Flügel, again with the 'Defence of Poesie,' in 1889. A compact reissue of 'Astrophel and Stella,' edited by Mr. A. W. Pollard, was published in 1891.

The sonnets, which were probably begun in 1575, and ceased soon after Sidney's marriage in 1583, are formed on the simple model of three rhyming decasyllabic quatrains, with a concluding couplet. Whether or no they were designed at the outset as merely literary exercises, imitating Surrey's addresses to Geraldine, they portray with historical precision the course of Sidney's ambiguous relations with Lady Rich. There is no reason to contest Nash's description of their argument as 'cruel chastity- the prologue Hope, the epilogue Despair.' The opening poems, which are clumsily contrived, are frigid in temper, but their tone grows by slow degrees genuinely passionate; the feeling becomes 'full,

material, and circumstantiated,' and many of the later sonnets, in reflective power, in felicity of phrasing, and in energy of sentiment, are 'among the best of their sort' (cf. LAMB, 'Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney,' in Essays of Elia, ed. Ainger, pp. 286 sq.). Shakespeare was doubtless indebted to them for the form of his own sonnets, and at times Sidney seems to adumbrate Shakespeare's subtlety of thought and splendour of expression.

Next in importance, as in date of publication, comes Sidney's 'Apologie for Poetrie.' About August 1579 Stephen Gosson published an attack on stage-plays, entitled 'The School of Abuse,' and he followed it up in November with an 'Apologie of the School of Abuse.' Both were dedicated to Sidney. On 16 Oct. 1579 Spenser wrote from Leicester House to Gabriel Harvey: "Newe Bookes I heare of none but only of one, that writing a certaine booke called The Schoole of Abuse, and dedicating it to Maister Sidney, was for hys labor scorned: if at leaste it be in the goodnesse of that nature to scorne. Suche follie is it, not to regarde afore hande the inclination and qualitie of him, to whom we dedicate oure bookes." Sidney at once set about preparing a retort to Gosson, which took the form of an essay on the influence of imaginative literature on mankind. By poetry he understood any work of the imagination. 'Verse,' he wrote, 'is but an ornament and no cause to poetry.' His 'Apologie' is in three parts; in the first, poetry is considered as teaching virtuous action, in the second the various forms of poetry are enumerated and justified, and in the third a sanguine estimate is offered of the past, present, and future position of English poetry. Sidney commended the work of Chaucer, Surrey, and Spenser, but failed to foresee the imminent greatness of English drama. He concluded with a spirited denunciation of the earth-creeping mind that cannot lift itself up to look at the sky of poetry. There is much that is scholastic and pedantic in the detailed treatment of his theme, but his general attitude is that of an enlightened lover of great literature. The work was first printed as an 'Apologie for Poetrie' in a separate volume with four eulogistic sonnets by Henry Constable [q. v.] for Henry Olney in 1595. It was appended, with the title of the 'Defence of Poesie,' to the 1598 edition of the 'Arcadia' and to all the reissues; it was edited separately in 1752 (Glasgow), by

Lord Thurlow in 1810, by Professor Arber in 1868, and by Mr. E. S. Shuckburgh in 1891.

Sidney's translation of the Psalms, in which his sister joined him, was long circulated in manuscript, and manuscript copies are numerous (cf. Bodl. Rawlinson MS., Poet. 25; Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 12047-8; and manuscript in Trin. Coll. Cambridge). Donne wrote a fine poem in praise of the work (cf. Poems, 1633; cf. Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, p. 15). It was first printed in 1823 by Robert Triphook under the editorship of Samuel Weller Singer [q. v]., from a manuscript in the handwriting of John Davies of Hereford, then in the possession of B. H. Bright, but now at Penshurst. The title ran: "The Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kindes of Verse, more rare and excellent for the Method and Variety than ever yet had been done in English. Begun by the noble and learned gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt., and finished by the right honorable the Countess of Pembroke, his sister.' The first forty-three psalms are, according to notes in the manuscript, alone by Sidney. The metres are very various. Psalm xxxvii is an early example of that employed by Tennyson in 'In Memoriam.' Sidney's renderings enjoyed the advantage of republication with discursive commentary by Mr. Ruskin; Mr. Ruskin's edition of them forms the second volume of his 'Bibliotheca Pastorum,' 1877, and bears the sub-title of 'Rock Honey-comb.' Sidney's paraphrase, according to Mr. Ruskin, 'aims straight, and with almost fiercely fixed purpose, at getting into the heart and truth of the thing it has got to say; and unmistakably, at any cost of its own dignity, explaining that to the hearer, shrinking from no familiarity and restricting itself from no expansion in terms, that will make the thing meant clearer' (Pref. p. xvii).

One of Sidney's poetic works is lost. When William Ponsonby obtained a license for the publication of the 'Arcadia' on 23 Sept. 1588, he also secured permission to print 'a translation of Salust de Bartas done by the same S' P. into englishe.' Greville mentioned in his letter to Walsingham that Sidney had executed this translation; and Florio, when dedicating the second book of his translation of Montaigne (1603) to Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland, and to Sidney's friend, Lady Rich, notes that he had

seen Sidney's rendering of 'the first septmane of that arch-poet Du Bartas,' and entreats the ladies to give it to the world. Nothing further is known of it.

All Sidney's extant poetry was collected by Dr. Grosart in 1873 (new edit. 1877). The editor includes, besides the sonnets, songs, poems from the 'Arcadia,' and the psalms, two 'pastoralls from Davison's 'Poetical Rhapsody;' 'Affection's Snare,' from Rawlinson MS. Poet. 84; and 'Wooing-stuffe,' from 'Cottoni Posthuma' (p. 327), where it is appended to a short prose essay, 'Valour Anatomized,' doubtfully assigned to Sidney.

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN

EDMUND VENABLES

[From the Dictionary of National Biography.]

BUNYAN, JOHN (1628-1688), author of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' 'Holy War,' 'Grace abounding,' &c., was born at the village of Elstow, Bedfordshire, a little more than a mile south of the town of Bedford, in November 1628. His baptism is recorded in the parish register of Elstow on the 30th of that month. The family of Buignon, Buniun, Bonyon, or Binyan (the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways), had been settled in the county of Bedford from very early times. Their first place of settlement appears to have been the parish of Pulloxhill, about nine miles from John Bunyan's native village. In 1199 one William Buniun held land at Wilstead, a mile from Elstow. In 1327 one of the same name, probably his descendant, William Boynon, was living at the hamlet of Harrowden, at the south-eastern boundary of the parish, close to the very spot which tradition marks out as John Bunyan's birthplace, and which the local names of 'Bunyan's End,' 'Bunyan's Walk,' and 'Farther Bunyan's' (as old, certainly, as the middle of the sixteenth century) connect beyond all question with the Bunyan family. A field known as 'Bonyon's End' was sold in 1548 by 'Thomas Bonyon of Elstow, labourer,' son of William Bonyon, to Robert Curtis, and other portions of his ancestral property gradually passed to other pur

chasers, little being left to descend to John Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan (d. 1641), save the 'cottage or tenement' in which he carried on the occupation of 'petty chapman,' or small retail trader. This, in his still extant will, he bequeathed to his second wife, Ann, and after her death to her stepson Thomas and her son Edward in equal shares. Thomas, the elder son, the father of the subject of this biography, was married three times, the first time (10 Jan. 1623) when only in his twentieth year, his second and third marriages occurring within a few months of his being left a widower. John Bunyan was the first child by his second marriage, which took place on 23 May 1627. The maiden name of his second wife was Margaret Bentley. She, like her husband, was a native of Elstow, and was born in the same year with him, 1603. A year after her marriage, her sister Rose became the wife of her husband's younger half-brother, Edward. The will of John Bunyan's maternal grandmother, Mary Bentley (d. 1632), with its 'Dutch-like picture of an Elstow cottage interior two hundred and fifty years ago,' proves (J. BROWN, Biography of John Bunyan, to which we are indebted for all these family details) that his mother 'came not of the very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways.' John Bunyan's father, Thomas Bunyan, was what we should now call a whitesmith, a maker and mender of pots and kettles. In his will he designates himself a 'brasier;' his son, who carried on the same trade and adopted the same designation when describing himself, is more usually styled a 'tinker.' Neither of them, however, belonged to the vagrant tribe, but had a settled home at Elstow, where their forge and workshop were, though they doubtless travelled the country round in search of jobs. Contemporary literature depicts the tinker's craft as disreputable; but we must distinguish between the vagrant and the steady handicraftsmen, dwelling in their own freehold tenements, such as the Bunyans evidently were. Bunyan, in his intense self-depreciation, writes: 'My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land.' This is certainly not language that we should be disposed to apply to a family which had from time immemorial occupied the same freehold, and made testamen