may have read, and been influenced to heroic deeds of self-abnegation and self-control by, the story of Sidney and Zutphen! ... I see it before me as in a picture. The clouds hang luridly over the blood-soaked plain, where, amid the dead and dying, lies the wounded knight, scarce heeding the distant press of battle and the disorder of the vanquished foe. His eagle eye is dim; his brow moist and hot with agony; the lips are parched, and the faltering tongue can scarcely sigh forth its earnest prayer for Water! water!' And already the cooling cup is before him, and the living lymph sparkles with refreshing power. But see how yonder dying soldier raises his writhing limbs from the hard earth, and bends on that blessed cup the keenest, eagerest, and most wistful eyes! The hero-chief catches their glance of mute, irrepressible agony, and puts aside the wished-for draught:- Take it,' he faintly says, 'to yonder soldier: he has more need of it than I'

This well-known anecdote, so indicative of the self-control and selfdenial which are the prime elements of true greatness, is the chief thing that familiarizes the name of Sir Philip Sidney to thousands of Englishmen. And yet he was a man worthy to be more fully and more closely known. Had he not died so early, he would undoubtedly have occupied a noble niche in our England's history. His views were broad and comprehensive; his mind had been sedulously cultivated; he had a large heart, as well as a large brain;-the making, in fact, of a generous statesman as well as an ac

complished knight. But he was destined to be one of those inheritors of unfulfilled renown,' of whom Shelley speaks; of those great men whose lives have been, so to speak, incomplete,--the torsos of grand but unfinished monuments.

Sir Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, in Kent, in 1554. He was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, thrice Lord Deputy in Ireland, himself a man of grave ability and singular virtue, and of Lady Mary, daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and the sister-in-law of the

ill-fated Lady Jane Grey. Spenser has celebrated this noble matron in his 'Ruins of Time,' as that 'goodly ladie,' who

Forth out of her happy womb did bring

The sacred gift of learning and all honour; In whom the heavens poured all their gifts upon her.'

The young Sidney's studies were successively pursued at Shrewsbury, Oxford, and Cambridge, where his quick intelligence and happy judgment marked him out as designed for a great and glorious career. He afterwards occupied three years in continental travel; and, returning to England, at once took up a high position in Elizabeth's brilliant court, and became the observed of all observers,' from the grace of his manners, the versatility of his accomplishments, and the chivalrous refinement of his disposition.

About 1578 he was introduced by Gabriel Harvey to the poet Spenser, whose warm and generous patron he remained through life, and whose Faery Queen' was undertaken at his encouragement. Spenser was domiciled a while at Penshurst, directing his chivalrous patron's poetical studies, and encouraging that peculiar Platonism of feeling which was then the fashion with the wits and courtiers of the great Gloriana's train. The poet of the Faery Queen' was, however, susceptible of a warmer and more passionate love, and nourished in the groves of Penshurst his devotion to a certain fair beauty of the North, whom he celebrated as Rosalind, the widow's daughter of the glens,' and whose cold loveliness was not to be forgotten even in the sunny Kentish dales,

where shepherds rich, And fruitful flocks bene everywhere to see.' In that portion of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' which was written at Penshurst (the 9th Eclogue), and which the poet dedicated to 'the noble and most virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry, Master Philip Sidney,' he disconsolately exclaims'Ye gentle shepherds! which your flocks do feed,

Whether on hills, or dales, or other where,
Bear witness all of this so wicked deed;

And tell the lass, whose flower is waxed a weed,

And faultless faith is turned to faithless fear, That she the truest shepherd's heart made bleed,

That lives on earth, and loved her most dear.'

From their charming dreams of Rosalinds, kind and unkind, from their pleasant pastoral fancies of well-mannered shepherds and welllooking shepherdesses, the two friends returned to the sparkling gaieties of courtly London. Sidney resumed his place in the brilliant circle that glittered around Elizabeth; Spenser (in July, 1580) accompanied the new Lord-Lieutenant, Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, to Ireland, as his private secretary, a post which the influence of Leicester and Sidney had procured him.

Sidney's stay at court was not of long duration. An affront put upon him by the Earl of Oxford, ‘a nobleinan of new-fashioned apparel and Tuscanish gestures, cringing sidenecke, eyes glauncing, fiznomie smirking,-whom Gabriel Harvey, in a rattling bundle of English hexameters,' has described as

'Delicate in speech, ¡queynte in araye, conceited in all poyntes;

In courtly guyles a passing singular odd man,' induced him to retire to his brotherin-law's seat at Wilton, the stately hall of the earls of Pembroke, where he occupied himself in the composition of his romance of the Arcadia.' This fine prose-poem, so unjustly neglected in these later days, the gentle writer never lived to finish. He appears to have originally prepared it for the delectation of his beloved sister, who perused it as he wrote it, sheet by sheet. He next produced his noble Defence of Poesy,' wherein he lauds the poet in no unworthy language. Often his rolling sentences seem full of deepsounding music, like the sea; and at all times he speaks in an elevated and majestic strain. Thus: ‘Of all sciences,' he enthusiastically exclaims, the poet is monarch! For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you

a cluster of grapes; that, full of that taste, you may long to pass farther. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness; but he cometh to you with words set with delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner; and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue; even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things, by hiding them in such others as have a pleasant taste.'

In 1581 Sir Philip shone a bright particular star' in the tourneys and joustings with which Elizabeth celebrated the visit of the Duke of Anjou, and was selected to accompany that unsuccessful wooer on his return to the continent. On the occasion of the investiture of the Prince Palatine, in 1583, with the order of the Garter, Sidney, who was his representative and proxy, was knighted by his royal mistress. He never lost her favour. When his adventurous

spirit prompted him to join the heroic Drake in his forays against the Spaniards, and to explore the virgin treasures of the New World, the queen's anxious mandate stopped him on the point of embarkation at Plymouth. It was perhaps her jealousy, rather than her regard, that again interfered to prevent him from developing his capacity for an active life, and caused him to lose the proffered crown of Poland, though Camden asserts that she refused to further his advancement, out of fear that she should lose the jewel of her times.' But when she decided upon aiding the Netherlanders in their brave revolt against the oppressions of Spain, Sidney was appointed to the governorship of Flushing, one of the towns which the Dutch had gratefully ceded to England, and made General of the Horse in the Earl of Leicester's army. The nephew, however, by no means approved the strategy of his powerful uncle, and passed severe and not

unmerited censures on his misconduct of the war. But his gallant spirit was no longer to chafe at its compulsory inaction. On the 22nd of September, 1586, he fell in with a detachment of the Spanish army proceeding to the reinforcement of Zutphen, and, though his own forces were far inferior in number, he led them to the attack, and won a complete success. In the fight he displayed all the valour of an English cavalier. One horse was shot under him, but he mounted another, and again plunged into the thickest of the fray. A ball, however, wounded him in the left thigh, and, faint from loss of blood, he was borne from the field. The wound proved mortal, and on the 25th of October the poetsoldier died. His body was removed to England, and interred, by command of the queen, in St. Paul's cathedral, the funeral rites being celebrated with peculiar pomp.

A monument to his memory was raised by Spenser, the friend whom he had loved so well, in the Pastorall Elegie of Astrophel,' where the poet does justice to the general grief with which the nation regarded Sir Philip's untimely fate-

'Hereof when tidings far abroad did pass,
The shepherds all which loved him full dear,
And sure full dear of all he loved was,
Did thither flock to see what they did hear.
And when that piteons spectacle they viewed,
The same with bitter tears they all bedewed.
And every one did make exceeding moan,
With inward anguish and great grief opprest;
And every one did weep and wail, and moan,
And means devis'd to show his sorrow best;
That from that hour, since first on grassy

green

Shepherds kept sheep, was not like mourning seen.'

Sir Philip's sister, the amiable and accomplished Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, also dedicated some graceful elegiac verses to the memory of the lost Astrophel'Woods, hills, and rivers, now are desolate,

Since he is gone the which them all did grace; And all the fields do wall their widow-state, Since death their fairest flow'r did late deface. The fairest flower in field that ever grew Was Astrophel; that was, we all may rue.' I think it is Todd who says that in upwards of two hundred authors he had found eulogiums upon Sidney; but perhaps not one of them has

penned a nobler panegyric than that expressed by the self-recorded epitaph of the admirable Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke: Here lies the Friend of Sir Philip Sidney.' As if to have been his friend was sufficient praise: was the summing up of a grand, true life. And, indeed, of all the best and brightest spirits of that heroic age, he was the faithful friend; of Dyer and Raleigh, of Wotton, and Drake, and the learned Hubert Languet. This man must have had in him a wonderful grace and fascination of manner, a singular loyalty of heart and sweetness of disposition, thus to have attached to himself the love of the great and good, the favour of his queen, the affection of the commonalty, and the high opinion of foreign nations. Could he have been that witling whom the petit-maître of English literature, Horace Walpole, dared to ridicule? He of whom his grave and sagacious father wrote to his brother Robert: 'Imitate his virtues, exercises, studies, and actions. He is a rare ornament of his age; the very formula that all well-disposed young gentlemen of our court do form their manners and life by. truth,' adds the father, I speak it without flattery of him, or myself: he hath the most virtues that I ever found in any man.' And so as poet, romancist, statesman, and soldier he has left a great example,

In

To teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man,
TENNYSON.

Yes: this is he whom Horace Walpole sneered at!-whose noble 'Arcadia' that literary coxcomb denounced as a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance.' Had the creator of the Gothic frivolities of Strawberry Hill ever read it? Could he feel the nobility of that fine prayer of Pamela's, which Charles I. murmured as he went forward to the sharp axe and the bloody scaffold Let calamity be the exercise, but not the overthrow of my virtue. Let the power of my enemies prevail, but prevail not to my destruction. Let my greatness be their prey; let my pain be the sweetness of their revenge; let