RETURNING to the annals of the life of Philip Sidney, we infer that he remained at Wilton until 1581, when he represented in Parliament his native county of Kent, and is sometimes incidentally mentioned as a member of select committees on important subjects. He was now widely known as a chivalrous and patriotic man, with the will to do and the soul to dare whenever the right required defence or the wrong demanded redress. He had not, it is true, performed any startling acts of heroism; nor had applauding multitudes borne him in the triumphal car, or crowned him with the bays of the victor; but his capacities for action in any glorious arena, were as manifest to those who knew him as is the strength of a giant in his repose. He was urged by two military leaders on the continent to join their enterprises. One was Prince Casimir, who conducted to the aid of Holland an army of German mercenaries, under the pay and patronage of Queen Elizabeth.
Another was Don Antonio, one of the seven claimants to the throne of Portugal, after the death of Henry V. Sidney wisely declined both these invitations. Casimir was an obstinate, reckless adventurer, and his marauding troops only pillaged the country they had engaged to protect. The Portuguese insurgent had no just claim to the crown, and neither the wisdom nor the nerve to sustain its assumption. The long talons of that neighboring bird of prey, Philip II., quietly clutched the kingdom, and the discrowned monarch retired to Paris, and died of grief for its loss.
A painful event to Sidney, about this time, was the death of his friend Languet. Two years before, the latter visited England for the sole purpose of seeing one whom he loved with parental fondness and watched with parental care. Distinguished attention was offered him by the English, whom he pronounced the happiest nation in Christendom. He was greatly revered by his own countrymen; and Dr. Zouch says that “the history of his life would be the history of Europe for near a century, as none of his rank in society had a more powerful influence in the direction of public affairs.” All the eminent authors of the day gave to his learning and his moral merit their concurrent praise; and Mornay Du Plessis wrote of him, “He was in reality what many wish to appear to be; he lived as the best of men should die.”
This truly illustrious man was buried at Antwerp with great ceremony, William of Orange acting as chief mourner.
But, hand in hand, Tragedy and Comedy walk the world together. As the one flings open the door of the sepulchre, the other rings in his ear the silver bells of mirth. From the grave of Languet, to which his mournful fancy wandered, Sidney was summoned to take part in one of those displays of knight-errantry which constituted so marked a feature of Elizabeth’s reign, and were intended chiefly as censers for the incense that was her vital element. Not content that every man should kneel as he entered her presence — Lord Burleigh only being exempted in his later years on account of the gout — and not satiated with the servile homage constantly breathed to her in private, she sometimes expected a shower of public flatteries.
The pause in her matrimonial negotiations, after the letter of Philip Sidney, was farther extended by the civil discords of France, which, with his own intrigues for the government of the Netherlands, so occupied the Duke of Anjou as to leave him little time for dalliance in unrewarded lovemaking. But Simiers, the subtle pleader, was left in England to watch the progress of affairs, and to carry significant messages back and forth; and so cleverly did he brush away from his master’s portrait the gathering dust of time, that its attractions really seemed to brighten with the lapse of years. In October, 1581, Anjou, resolving upon a final master-stroke, sent over a splendid legation to bring matters to a close. The “crowned nymph” as poor Stubbs called her, chose to receive the French peers in a sort of fairy palace which she had built for the occasion at Whitehall, and there she entertained them with banquets and pageants, while her ministers were preparing the marriage articles. This spacious structure was built of timber and canvas, and lighted by nearly three hundred windows, and on each side were ten galleries for spectators. The walls were spangled with gold, and hung with festoons of fruits, flowers, and garlands of ivy and bay leaves. The lofty dome was painted blue, to imitate the sky, where the commingling of stars, sunbeams, and clouds, with the royal arms must have suggested the idea of a general eruption in the firmament.
Beside the tilts and tourneys, and other entertainments, an allegorical device, called a triumph, was enacted by several of the young courtiers, among whom was Philip Sidney, whose presence seemed necessary to give the finishing touch to every festal rite. Let us fancy the long galleries filled with lovely women and gallant cavaliers in their grandest ruffs and most elaborate hose and doublets, while bands of music pour sweet harmonies upon the air. At one end of the tilting-ground is a lofty castle or fortress, termed the Castle of Perfect Beauty, and in it, visible to all the crowd sits the Queen, still fair and handsome, and smiling blandly on the gay illusion. Six trumpeters enter the enchanted circle, and announce the first of four knights who propose to attack the fortress, and obtain possession of its prize. The Earl of Arundel, in gilt armor and on a richly caparisoned steed, leads the van, attended by four pages and twenty squires, all of whom are draped in yellow doublets, crimson velvet hose trimmed with gold lace, and crimson velvet hats with gold bands and yellow feathers. Thirty yeomen follow, dressed in the same colors, of less costly material.
Then rides in Lord Windsor, also in gilt armor; his four pages and twenty-four gentlemen in short cloaks of scarlet, and doublets and hose of tawny orange, black velvet; hats with silver bands and white feathers, silvered rapiers and scabbards of black velvet; and his trumpeters and threescore yeoman in similar array.
— “Then proceeded Maister Philip Sidneie, in verie sumptuous manner, with armor, part blew, and the rest gilt and engraven, with foure spare horsses, having caparisons and furniture verie rich and costlie, as some of cloth of gold im-brodered with pearle, and some imbrodered with gold and silver feathers, verie richlie and cunning-lie wrought; he had foure pages that rode on his four spare horsses, who had cassocke coats and Venetian hose, all of cloth of silver, laied with gold lace, and hats of the same with gold bands and white feathers, and each one a paire of white buskins. Then had he thirtie gentlemen and yeomen, and foure trumpetters who were all in cassock coats, and Venetian hose of yellow velvet laied with silver lace, yellow velvet caps with silver bands and white feathers, and everie one a paire of white buskins; and they had upon their coats a scrowle or band of silver, which came scarf-wise over the shoulder, and so down under the aruie, with this posie or sentence written upon it, both before and behind, “Sic nos non nobis!”
Sir Fulke Greville brings up the rear in equal splendor, his attendants being apparalled in orange and gold.
After various brilliant evolutions, and a number of long harangues, in which the Castle of Beauty is summoned to surrender, and of course refuses, a grand assault is made upon it by means of scaling-ladders, cannons loaded with sweet powders and perfumes, flowers, love-letters, and similar deadly weapons. Several other knights come to aid the besiegers, two of them representing Adam and Eve in armor, decorated with painted apples and figleaves, and helmets covered with long hair. Another, with dishevelled locks and woful gestures, personates Despair. But the fortress proves invulnerable, and at length each assailant presents an olive-branch to the Queen, in token of submission. Her Majesty graciously thanks the combatants, and is pleased with the gay masquerade that testifies to the French ambassadors the loyalty and admiration of her subjects.
The arrival of the Duke multiplied these nuptial festivities, in which, as Motley says, “nothing was omitted but the nuptials.” For several months, the Queen played the drama of caprice which had long kept her subjects and her suitor in perpetual agitation, until the latter hastily took his departure, irritated beyond endurance by her pitiful vacillation, and tired of a ten years’ chase after the ignis fatuus of a crown. The States of Belgium had given him a limited sovereignty, with the title of Duke of Brabant, in the hope of securing for themselves religious toleration and defence against the tyranny of Spain; his prospective alliance with Elizabeth, seeming to promise the united protection of England and France. He was accompanied, on his return thither, by a brilliant cortège of English gentlemen of high degree, sent by the Queen in token of her good will.
The Lords Hunsdon, Howard, and Leicester, Philip Sidney, and a hundred or two besides, landed at Flushing with the Duke and his own splendid retinue. William of Orange, the ever-faithful sentinel, was there to greet him with a large deputation; and amid music, artillery, and acclamations, they were escorted to an elegant banquet, which was furnished with the same astonishing prodigality of sugar utensils and ornaments as were those given in Venice to Henry III. of France. After a week of gala days and nights, they were all conveyed in fifty-four vessels to Antwerp, and made an imposing entrée into that opulent capital. The military companies in their bright uniforms, the Hanseatic merchants in their old German costume, the city functionaries in black velvet and gold chains, and the cavalcade of illustrious men from three neighboring countries, marched in stately procession through triumphal arches, flashing torches, and bands of martial music; and for many days orations were delivered, compliments exchanged, and allegories acted, until everybody must have been exhausted, and the English lords very glad to set sail homeward.
Through all these glittering ceremonials, Sidney found time for extensive reading, and constant association with men of letters, of whom he was ever the liberal patron.’ He accumulated a large and choice library, employing agents to purchase for him at the annual fairs in Leipsic, Frankfort, and other towns. We read continually of books that were dedicated to him by the most distinguished authors of England, Germany and France. Scipio Gentilis, a professor of law in Oxford, and celebrated as a Latin versifier, addressed him in this eulogistic strain: —
“Others admire in you, Philip Sidney, the splendor of your birth — your genius in your childhood, capable of all philosophy — your honorable embassy undertaken in your youth, and the experience obtained from visiting the cities and viewing the manners of so many countries — the exhibition of your personal valor and prowess in the public spectacles and equestrian exercises, in your manhood; — let others admire all these qualities. I not only admire, but I love and venerate you, because you regard poetry so much as to excel in it; nor will I omit any opportunity of acknowledging my obligations to you, as far as it is in my power.”
Banco, a learned theologian, inscribes to Sidney his biography of the distinguished philosopher Ramus, who, as heretofore stated, was one of the victims of the massacre at Paris. “Without flattery,” he says, “I pronounce you to be a perfect image and resemblance of nobility. For, not to mention your descent from the family of the Earls of Warwick, eminently illustrious throughout all England, your virtue, outshining the splendor of an high lineage, seems to me a theme of just encomium. I remember well, when I first saw you, when I first contemplated with wonder your uncommon endowments of mind and body; I remember well, I say, the words of Gregory, who declared the Angli, or English, that were at Rome, to be really angels.” If this sounds like fulsome panegyric, we must remember that it was a hearty and honest sentiment, uttered in an age of such comparative simplicity, that language was then used to express thought, and not to conceal it.
A work on military tactics was dedicated to him, because, as the author says, he “found none more forward to further and favor martial knowledge; being of himself most ready and adventurous in all exercises of war and chivalry.”
Richard Hakluyt, the renowned cosmographer, inscribed his first collection of voyages to this “most generous promoter of all ingenious and useful knowledge.” Lipsius, the scholar and critic, in a similar instance, addressed him as “ the bright star of Britain, on whom light is copiously diffused by Virtue, by the Muses, by the Graces, and by Fortune.”
Sidney never saw the noontide glory of the Elizabethan day of literature. It was now but in the purple dawn, to which his own taste and talent lent many rays of brightness. He was already known as a poet, and very soon he wrote an Essay, called the “Defence of Poesy,” which is believed to be the first critical work of merit in the English language,. The names of Shakspeare, Ben Johnson, Raleigh, Greene, Drayton, Davies, Chapman, and others, were yet unknown; and, with the exception of Sidney and Spenser, there were no poetical celebrities whose effusions have any interest for modern readers.
The author of the “Faerie Queen” was born to that frequent inheritance of genius — poverty; but the friendship which he formed at Oxford with Sidney and Raleigh, and the patronage of the Earl of Leicester, had secured his present exemption from those sordid cares that so vex the poet’s soul. The first was a most kind and generous friend; he invited him to Penshurst, where they spent several weeks together, and induced him to transfer his attention from pastoral to heroic verse. Mankind are probably indebted to this piece of advice for that grand and vivid epic which has given delight to them, and renown to its creator. The early portions of the “Faërie Queen” were submitted to the criticism of Sir Philip, and there is a story, (not, however, very reliable,) that when he heard the description of Despair, in the ninth canto of the first book, he was so transported with admiration, as to direct his steward to present the author with fifty pounds; when the second stanza was read, he ordered the sum to be doubled; at the third, he called for two hundred pounds, and commanded its immediate payment, lest he should be induced to give away all he possessed.
Gabriel Harvey was another learned friend of Sidney, but rather pretentious and pedantic, and only remembered for his attempts to introduce the Latin hexameter into English verse. All his contemporaries were somewhat infected with his example. Sidney followed it, in some of the eclogues of the Arcadia, and even Spenser himself, notwithstanding his admission that the English hexameter has much the effect of “a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her, or of a lame dog that holdeth one leg up.”
Sir Fulke Greville, afterward Lord Brooke, was the relative and the most intimate friend of Sidney; they were of the same age, and both allied
“IN BRAVE PURSUIT OF CHIVALROUS EMPRISE.”
A terrace near the seat of the former in Warwickshire, is still pointed out as the spot where they walked together on summer mornings, and held the genial converse of kindred souls. The poems of Greville, though quite celebrated in their day, are now known only to the curious searchers into literature, their harsh and pedantic style being a cumbrous vehicle for lofty sentiment and ingenious imagery. They consist of two tragedies, and a hundred love sonnets, in one of which he addresses his mistress as “Fair Dog!” He wrote a memoir of his early friend, and, in an inscription which he composed for his own monument, he expressed his love and admiration in the significant climax, FULKE GREVILLE, SERVANT TO QUEEN ELIZABETH, COUNSELLOR TO KING JAMES, AND FRIEND TO SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.”
Even the most unpretending sketch of Sir Philip Sidney would be incomplete without some notice of his “Defence of Poesy,” (or as it was termed by him, “Apologie for Poesie,”) a work which is justly celebrated as the most finished prose production of that era, and as the basis of numberless dissertations that have since appeared on the same subject. If it seem remarkable that the “divine art” should require defence, it must be remembered that no master hand had touched the lyre in England, since the days of Chaucer and Gower, who lived when Petrarch and Dante woke Italy with its echoes. The few subsequent poets, though not destitute of merit, had done nothing to sustain its dignity or elevate its tone. In an age that with the chivalric spirit of the past, singularly blended great intellectual activity, laborious research, and a freedom of speech which has been almost refined away in our more fastidious civilization, it is not surprising that satirists were numerous, keen, and critical. The Puritans, too, with all the zeal of a new-born sect, anathematized poetry in merciless measure. A creature born in sin and meriting perdition, they argued, should devote his hours to penance and prayer, not to syren melodies and carnal songs of pleasure. The pilgrim through a vale of tears, had no right to prate of the allurements of beauty, or dream amid the chimeras of an unholy brain. In the judgment of these stern old reformers, as sorcery bewitched the people, so poetry bewitched language. Scorning, as they did, both the authority and the vices of aristocracy, they equally scorned its refinements and its culture. Thus the glowing words of passion and of love, stirred into rhyme and rhythm by the poet’s wand, seemed to them allied to the sensual more than to the intellectual, and to be figments of heathen philosophy, rather th’an emanations of Christian intelligence.
It was to combat both the carping critics and the sturdy reformers, that this young champion sallied forth, armed with the simple but effective weapons of reason and of truth. Of his success we leave our readers to judge.
He begins by the announcement that having “slipped into the title of a poet,” he desires to say something in defence of “that art which, from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children.” He alludes to its antiquity, and argues that in all 14 countries it “opens the portals to all other knowledge.” Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod were the fathers of Grecian learning; the fables of Amphion and Orpheus were tributes to musical verse; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio made Italy the “treasure-house of science;” Chaucer and Gower were the morning stars of England’s day of song. The philosophers of Greece garlanded their philosophy with the flowers of poesy, and Herodotus added the charm of poetic fiction to win attention to his facts. In Wales, poetry had outdone all art and science; “in Ireland, where learning goes very bare, yet are their poets held in devout reverence. Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians, where no writing is, yet have they their poets, who sing of their ancestors’ deeds, and praises of their gods.” He speaks of the high esteem in which the poet was held in Rome, being called Yates, a diviner or prophet; and alludes to the “heavenly poesie” of the Hebrew Psalmist. He proceeds to contrast the art with other arts and sciences: —
“There is no art delivered unto mankind, that hath not the works of Nature for its principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become Actors and Players, as it were, of what Nature will have set forth. So doth the Astronomer look upon the stars, and that he hath set down what order Nature hath taken therein. So doth the Arithmetician and Geometrician in their divers sorts of quantities. So doth the Musician, in tunes, tell you which by Nature agree, which not. The natural Philosopher thereon hath his name, and the moral Philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, or passions of man; and follow nature, saith he, therein, and thou shalt not err. The Lawyer saith what men have determined. The Historian, what men have done. The Grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the Rhetorician and Logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The Physician weigheth the nature of man’s body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the Metaphysicke, though it be in the second and abstract motions, and therefore be accounted supernatural, yet doth he indeed build upon the depth of Nature.”
He follows these accurate distinctions of the material world with an enthusiastic picture of the ideal realm whose golden gates the poet only may unbar.
“Only the Poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature; in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite a new form, of such as never were nature; as the Heroes, Demi-gods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and the like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden.”
He then enumerates with great clearness the various kinds of poets, the religious, the philosophical, and those that “justly may be called Vates, who range only into the divine consideration, and what may be, and should be.”
“It is not rhyming and versing,” he adds, “that make a Poet, (no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armor should be an advocate and no soldier,) but is that joining notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
— “The end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that, have a most just title to be princes over the rest; wherein we easily can show, the Poet is worthy to have it before any other competitors. Among whom principally to challenge, step forth the Moral Philosophers; whom methinks I see coming towards me with a sullen’ gravity, (as they could not abide vice by daylight,) rudely clothed, for to witness outwardly their contempt of outward things, with books in their hands against glory, whereto they set their name; sophistically speaking against subtlety, and angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger. These men, casting largess as they go of definitions, divisions, and distinctions, with a scornful interrogative do soberly ask, whether it be possible to find any path so ready to lead a man to virtue as that which teacheth what virtue is.”— “The Historian scarcely gives leisure to the Moralist to say so much, but that he, loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself for the most part upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of Hearsay, having much ado to accord differing writers, and to pick truth out of partiality; better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the present age, and yet better knowing how this world goes, than how his own wit runs; curious for antiquities, and inquisitive of novelties, a wonder to young folks, and a tyrant in table-talk; — denieth, in a great chafe, that any man for teaching of virtue is comparable with him.”
— “The Philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one who hath no other guide but him, shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the Historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless Poet perform both; for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he couples the general notion with the particular example.”
“Tully taketh much pains, and many times not without poetical helps, to make us know the force love of our country hath in us. Let us but hear old Anchises speaking in the midst of Troy’s flames, or see Ulysses in the fulness of all Calypso’s delights, bewail his absence from barren and beggarly Ithaca. Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness; let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing or whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus; and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen its genus and difference.”
“Now therein of all sciences is our Poet the Monarch. For he doth not only shew the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect, 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 further. 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 in 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 other as have a pleasant taste.”
“By these examples and reasons, I think it may be manifest, that the Poet, with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other Art doth. And so a conclusion not unfitly ensues; that as virtue is the most excellent resting-place for all worldly learning to make its end of, so Poetry being the most familiar to teach it, and most princely to move towards it, in the most excellent work, is the most excellent workman.”
Here he presents at length the relative value and beauty of the various forms of poetry; — the pastoral, the elegiac, the comic, the tragic, the lyric, — and enthusiastically dilates upon the union of metre with music: —
“I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice, than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? In Hungary, I have seen in the manner of all feasts, and other such like meetings, to have songs of their ancestors’ valor, which that soldier-like nation think one of the chiefest kindlers of courage. The incomparable Lacedaemonians did not only carry that kind of Music ever with them to the field; but even at home, as such songs were made, so were they all content to be singers of them; when the lusty men were to tell what they did, the old men, what they have done, the young men, what they would do.”
“Since then,” he sums up the argument, “Poetry is of all human learning the most ancient, and of most fatherly antiquity; — since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman and Greek gave such divine names unto it, the one of prophesying, the other of making; and that indeed the name of making is fit for him, considering that where all other Arts retain themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the Poet only bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a Conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a Conceit. Since neither his description nor end containeth any evil, the thing described cannot be evil, since his effects be so good as to teach goodness, and delight the learners of it; since therefore, (namely, in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledges,) he doth not only far surpass the Historian, but for instructing is wellnigh comparable to the Philosopher; since the holy Scripture hath whole parts in it poetical, and that even our Saviour Christ vouchsafed to use the flowers of it; since all his kindnesses are not only in their united forms, but in their several directions fully commendable, I think, (and think I think rightly,) the Laurel Crown appointed for triumphant Captains, doth worthily, of all other learnings, honor the Poet’s triumph.”
He proceeds to canvass the objections against poetry; just the objections of the stoics of old and the utilitarians of to-day; of men who would measure the soul by the limited compass of reason, and reduce life to a practical demonstration; who would stifle the yearnings of love, strangle the generous impulse, and dissipate the heaven-born phantoms of beauty and of taste. We will not follow Sir Philip Sidney’s argument, because, as we have before stated, it has had so many admirers, and so many plagiarists, that under other guises its face is universally familiar. It is enough to say that its accuracy of reasoning and sustained dignity of thought are richly adorned with the flowers of fancy, and with classical illustration, while, in the enthusiasm which pervades the whole “Defence,” we see that he wrote in obedience to what he tells us was the mandate of his Muse, “Look in thy heart, and write.”
He especially regrets that poetry has fallen from its high esteem in England; and gives, as the cause, that “base men with servile wits undertake it, who think it enough if they be rewarded of the printer; and so, as Epaminondas is said with the honor of his virtue to have made an office by his exercising it, which before was contemptible, to become highly respected; so these men no more but setting their names to it, by their own disgracefulness, disgrace the most graceful Poesie.”— “As the fertilest ground must be manured,” he says again, “so must the highest plying wit have a Dædalus to guide him.”
He winds up this “hymn of intellectual beauty,” as it has been well pronounced, by the following eloquent peroration: —
“So that since the ever praiseworthy Poesie is full of virtue, breeding delightfulness, and void of no gift that ought to be in the noble name of learning, since the blames laid against it are either false or feeble, since the cause why it is not esteemed in England is the fault of Poet apes, not Poets; since lastly our tongue is most fit to honor Poesie, and to be honored by Poesie, I conjure you all that have had the ill luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of Poesie; no more to laugh at the name of Poets, as though they were next inheritor to fools; no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer, but to believe with Aristotle that they were the ancient treasurers of the Grecian divinity; to believe with Bembus that they were first bringers in of all civility; to believe with Scaliger that not philosopher’s precepts can sooner make you an honest man, than the reading of Virgil; to believe with Clauserus, the translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the heavenly deity by Homer and Hesiod, under the veil of fables to give us all knowledge, Logic, Rhetoric, Philosophy, natural and moral, and Quid non? To believe with me that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused; to believe with Landin that they are so beloved of the gods, that whatsoever they write, proceeds out of a divine fury. Lastly, to believe themselves when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verse. Thus doing, your names shall flourish in the printer’s shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all; you shall dwell upon superlatives; thus doing, though you be Libertino paire natus, you shall suddenly grow Herculea proles, si quid mea carmina possunt. Thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrix, or Virgil’s Anchises. But if (fie of such a But) you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of Poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift itself up to look to the skies of Poetry; then, though I will not wish unto you the asses’ ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poet’s verses as Bubonax was to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland, yet thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all Poets, that while you live you live in love, and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”
“In this luminous criticism and effusion of poetic feeling,” remarks D’Israeli, “Sidney has introduced the principal precepts of Aristotle, touched by the fire and sentiment of Longinus; and for the first time in English literature, has exhibited the beatitude of criticism in a poetcritic.”
In concert with his sister, Sir Philip wrote a Paraphrase of the Psalms of David. The last work that occupied his pen was a translation of an Essay by Du Plessis on the Truth of Christianity. It was incomplete at the time of his death.
In the year 1581, the Earl of Leicester made himself very obnoxious to the Papists by his active measures in the discovery and suppression of several conspiracies projected by them against the Queen. His violent denunciations were responded to by an invective from a Jesuit, named Green, consisting of a circumstantial detail of all the crimes which had ever been laid to his charge, intermingled with political reflections upon the connection between his iniquities and the Popish dissatisfaction with the government. This publication was circulated throughout Europe and read in England with the greatest avidity; the efforts made by the Queen for the suppression of statements so prejudicial to her favorite, only increasing its notoriety.
Sir Philip Sidney, with all the pride of affection and of zeal for the family honour, attempted — AMENITIES OF LITERATURE, VOL. II. to refute these charges in a letter, which, though ingenious, was by no means conclusive in his uncle’s favor, and was marked rather by warmth than by judgment. He probably failed to satisfy himself, as his work was unpublished -until its appearance many years after in the’ Sidney Papers — LODGE’S ILLUSTRIOUS PERSONAGES.