SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.* EvEN those who, except for Tennyson, have

never heard the name of Burleigh, and who regard Thomas and Oliver Crom- well as identical, have all heard of Sir Philip Sidney. The story of his refusal of a draught of water for the sake of a poor private, has enshrined him in history by the aide of Alfred with the cakes, Raleigh with his cloak, and Clarence with his butt of Malmsey. It is consoling to know that, whatever may have happened to the cakes and the wine, the water-story is accepted even by Sidney's latest biographer. But to most people it seems a mystery why Sidney should have become a popular hero, and be regarded as an Elizabethan " admirable Crichton," on so slender a basis. Mr. Symonds has reconstructed the hero for us, and converted the

• Sidney. r English Yen of Letters.") By J. A. Symonds. London : Mac- millan and Co. lay figure of tableaux vivants into a real personage, even if he still leaves him something of a Marceline, a potentiality rather than a realisation of the hopes of a nation. It is not, however, very surprising that Philip Sidney was a

hero to his own age. He was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, the owner of Penshurat, a Lord-Lieutenant, or Lord-Deputy, as he was then called, of Ireland, and Lord President of Wales, and of Lady Mary Sidney, a sister of Lady Jane Grey's husband, and daughter of the Duke of Northumberland. He was also nephew of Elizabeth's Earl of Leicester, of Kenilworth fame. Add to this that he was beautiful to behold, early wise, an athlete,

a writer of State papers, a critic, a poet, and a soldier, and yet we have not wholly accounted for his fame. That he owes, in fact, to two additional marks. He was the literary and courtly

Protestant and Puritanical hero, and he died young in battle for the Protestant cause. He first became famous not so much for

the Arcadia or The Defense of Poetry, as for his sturdy pro- tests against the pernicious match between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou (of Minim' Diana of Poitiers), which, in the eyes

of the Protestants, bid fair to be as disastrous as that between Philip of Spain and Mary.

Philip Sidney, whose temper of mind and thought, and body too, would seem to have resembled that of Milton in the days of Comus (first performed, by the way, before one of Sir Henry Sidney's successors at Ludlow Castle), became confirmed in a sturdy Protestantism by the fact that he was in Paris, for- tunately for him at the English Embassy, on that night of

horrors, St. Bartholomew, 1572. He started thence on the "grand tour;" sat for his portrait to Paul Veronese at Venice ; and on his way home was, at the age of twenty-three, sent as Envoy of Elizabeth, first to Prague, to congratulate the German

Emperor, a Hapsburg, on his election ; and then to Heidelberg, to condole with the Princes of the Palatine Electorate on their father's death. Sidney used his opportunities to inveigh against• Spain and Popery, and try to establish a Protestant alliance, a fcedus evangelicum. But, as Mr. Symonds excellently puts it, there was- " In the very spirit of Protestantism a power antagonistio to cohesion It has always been thus with the party of progress, the Liberals of world-transforming moments in the march of thought. United by no sanctioned Credo, no fixed Corpus Fidei, no community of conservative tradition ; owning no allegiance to a spiritual monarch; depending for their being on rebellion against authority and discipline ; disputing the fundamental propositions from which organisation has hitherto been expanded, they cannot act

in concert The very instinct for change, the very apprehension which sets reformers in motion, implies individualities of opinion and incompatibilities of will. Therefore, they are collectively weak when ranged against the ranks of orthodoxy and established discipline. To expect, therefore, as Sidney and the men with whom he sym- pathised expected, that a Protestant league could be formed capable of hurling back the tide of Catholic reaction, was little short of the indulgence of a golden dream."

So much, however, did Sidney impress those with whom he came in contact, that there seems to be reason to suppose that he was named as a candidate for the Crown of Poland, just vacated by Henri III. of France. Meanwhile, negotiations were going on for Philip's marriage with Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex,—William, not Elizabeth's favourite Robert. And so begins the most singular, and in some respects in- teresting, part of Sidney's life. In 1575 the lady was only thirteen, yet the Earl of Essex, on his deathbed, next year sent a message to Sidney,—" I wish that he might match with my daughter. I call him son, he is so virtuous, wise, and godly."

But the " virtuous, wise, and godly " youth was then more ambitious than amorous, and the odd thing is that until the Lady Penelope was, against her will, married to Lord Rich, he never seems to have felt a spark of love for her. When the rose belonged to another, he seems to have suddenly discovered its beauty, and wished to pluck it. But the rose had thorns, and

the outcome of the virtuous, wise, and godly youth's attempts to steal it, and the pricking of the fingers he got thereby, are set forth in Astrophel and Stella, the earliest and still among the best of love-poems in the language, and as far superior in merit to the better-known (at least by name) romance of Arcadia, as L'Allegro is better than Paradise Regained, or In Memoriam than The Promise of May. It is, like In Memoriam and

Shakespeare's sonnets, a series of short " swallow-flights" of

song. Unlike In Memoriam. and the Shakespearian sonnets, however, it mainly consists of sonnets, but they are not all in one metre, and they are interspersed with songs in quite different

forme. Among them is the song the first line of which is familiar from Falstaff's " Have I caught my heavenly jewel P" It

was occasioned by his finding his Stella asleep, and stealing a kiss. This is in one of the lighter moods. In the course of the series, he ranges through all the moods of the lyre, from the beginning of love to the height of hope, and then down to the depths of despair. For the lady proved obdurate. To Astro- phel's eyes, her cruelty was due to ber virtue ; but as she eventually left Lord Rich for Sir Christopher Blount, whom she afterwards married, it would appear that it was disinclination for a man who only began to love her when he could not marry her, rather than any more elevated feeling, that moved her to reject his bold advances. However that may have been, it is Astropltel and Stella that formed Sidney's highest title to literary fame, and which, as Mr. Symonds points out, was a far greater work then than now, preceding as it did the sonnets of Shakespeare, the first outburst of true Renaissance poetry in England, and the triumph of the English drama. The Arcadia, except for the poems in it, imitated as it is from the old Greek novels and Italian romances, is not to be read at this day without yawning. It consists of an awful series of adventures with robbers and pirates, and is full of battles and duellos, interspersed with pastoral episodes, couched in an elaborate and antithetical style, which, in spite of fine passages, is very wearying. It was originally written for his sister, Lady Pembroke, for " private circulation only," though when published it ran through seventeen editions before 1674. It is curious, by the way, in view of recent controversy, to note that Milton talks of the " vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia." Was Milton, as well as Mr. Gosse, guilty of that " most detestable " crime of pretending to read books which he had not read ? But though Astrophel and Stella and the Arcadia made Sidney the fashionable literary hero of the Court and society (then one and the same), it was the " simple gentle. man " who gave the Earl of Oxford the lie direct when he called him a " puppy," who urged the Protestant Alliance, who got a grant of land in America to go with Drake to establish a colony there, and who finally, as second in command to Leicester in the Netherlands, lost his life fighting against Spain in a miserable skirmish against hopeless odds, and who by his death touched the popular heart, and will remain for ever one of the heroes of English history.