The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

by Philip Sidney

INTRODUCTION

In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material, expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia holds an important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the successive transformations, and the final development of English fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings, when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the chansons de gestes.

In the exordium of his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney himself lays stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature. Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose—this is the natural line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in metre.

Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said, are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince. Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature, did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time, was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but would have been proud to be compared with Heliodorus and Longus, and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets, preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his Apologie the fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative literature.

The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and Alexander. Some of these were written in prose originally, but the majority were translations, paraphrases, or recensions of metrical narratives. Some were turned into verse again, and again in that form were the material for further prose recensions. And throughout these transformations the matter, the style, and the spirit of the stories underwent hardly any change. It was only now and then that the versifier gave a rein to imagination in his battles and pageants; or was hurried by the swing of the metre into bursts of lyricism, or a more dramatic curtness in the dialogue; or cut short the explication of motive and plot, which the prose-writer was inclined to elaborate. How well the prose sufficed to the minstrel converting it into his own idiom may be seen by comparing such a metrical romance as the Scots poem, Lancelot of the Laik, with the samples of the French prose story from which it was translated, in the edition by the Early English Text Society. There is very little poetical heightening except where the minstrel tacks on a prologue of his own composing; the rest is but the effect of the paraphraser’s occasional impulse to change and invent.[1] Certainly these writers were not embarrassed by any preconceptions of a strict boundary line between prose and the language of poetry, and the uses for which either was especially ordained. The traditional themes were handled, in both verse and prose, in the same traditional manner, and were animated by the same spirit of romantic adventure.

A change of style is almost invariably the result of a change of thought and feeling; but no profound mental and moral revolution like that which underlay the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, was the occasion for turning the mediaeval romances into prose. When all literary compositions were intended for singing and recitation, they naturally took a metrical form; but when books were meant to be read in bower and cloister, it was left to the writer to choose his vehicle. Thus, while there were true poets like Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach among those working upon the material of legend, many arrayed themselves in the poetic vesture without having a spark of divine fire; and the style of many of these metrical narratives strikes one as too prosaic for the subject, especially if we base our expectations on Malory, to us the chief exemplar of mediaeval romance, whose prose, though not in the least resembling in structure that bastard thing, prose poetry, is thoroughly epical in its stark simplicity, its sensuous colour, and the haunting suggestion of beauty and ideality. It was not an age of poetry in the way this can be said of the early period of Greek literature, when philosophers, historians, and lawgivers spoke in metre because the muse was in them. Romance is the decadence of poetry; and while the traditional forms survived, the poetic impulse grew weaker and weaker.

By Caxton and his successors the prose romances of the age of chivalry were multiplied and circulated among wider audiences than even those who listened to the mediaeval jongleur: these were the first popular novels of the Tudor age, yet they were already getting out of date, inasmuch as they reflected the manners and the ideals of a bygone period. But there had arisen on the continent two forms of romance that represent another stage in the development of fiction; the Spanish chivalric romance typified in Amadis of Gaul, and the pastoral novel of Sanazzaro and Montemayor. The three great legendary cycles, no matter how wild and fabulous their later excursions, always claimed to be a reading of history; each writer was careful to state his authorities, real or fictitious; and though he added life and circumstance to his narrative, the substance was put forward and accepted as history. In Spain romance had begun exactly as in Britain with poetic chronicles of heroic periods, such as the story of the Cid, round which gathered in the process of time a vast accretion of anonymous legend. But in the Amadis, printed in 1508, but current in oral or manuscript versions for two centuries at least, Spain gave birth to a kind of romance in which such history even as that in the legendary chronicles had no place. Amadis himself, it is true, was connected with the Arthuriad by his lineage; but with this exception, the author or authors let both history and historical tradition go, and in the various knight-errantries of Amadis gave to their imaginative powers their full fling. In the beauty of its ladies, the size of its giants, the valour, constancy, and self-denial of its heroes, the Amadis eclipses all its rivals; and in the Palmerins and Esplandians that were the sequel, these exaggerations are carried to even more ridiculous lengths. The older romances had usually been localised in actual places and countries, though these were often idealised out of all likeness to reality; but Amadis and his successors met with their adventures and performed their feats of arms in a region created by the fancy of their authors. Spenser’s Fairy Land, and Sidney’s Arcadia were no doubt suggested by this romantic geography.

Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy were avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil. Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his Daphnis and Chloe depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel began its course with the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the Galatea of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of Diana, who added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which the spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.

The pastoral, however, was only a digression in the slow advance of the English novel towards its goal; and though it furnished perhaps half the inspiration of Sidney’s romance, it does not bear upon the present theme, the significance of the Elizabethan novel as represented by the Arcadia in the evolution of English fiction. The pastoral romance, it should nevertheless be noted, is more closely allied to poetry than to prose fiction proper, not merely because it mingles verse with a flowery and emotional prose, but chiefly because it is an offspring of the free imagination and not of the study of real life. The pastoral impulse has always been something factitious and retrograde in the history of literature and art, something exactly contrary to the return to nature to which Wordsworth gave the strongest impetus, and which exercised such an enormous effect on the advance of realism.

The Elizabethan novel, the general characteristics of which are roughly summed up in the words “poetic invention,” came next to mediaeval romance in a natural order of succession. It did not bring fiction any nearer the type conditioned by the laws of expression in strict prose, of the eighteenth century pattern. In an age of poetry the novel had become more poetic in style and in attitude to life than it had ever been. The Arcadia and Euphues have less than the Morte d’Arthur of the real world of men and women. A superficial view, accordingly, might suggest that with a hybrid and unfruitful type of art like the poetic novel one line of development came to an end, especially as we see that Defoe, in the next age, makes an entirely new beginning, abjuring romance and free imagination, turning directly to actual experience for his material, and using a homespun style, as close as he could make it to the speech of everyday life. Yet the semi-poetic novel represents a definite stage of transition, and it does contain elements that were to be developed later. The masterpieces of Italian story-tellers had made their mark upon the Elizabethans, who acquired the art of constructing a plot, and giving their narratives a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They showed also a more conscious effort to portray individual character; and by Lyly the analysis of motive and feeling was carried to a point that seems to anticipate Richardson. More than this, they came a good step nearer to reality, although they failed so flagrantly to reproduce the atmosphere of the real. They chose their subjects from the sphere of human experience; and they rejected giants, fairies, and witchcraft, together with the

“Forests and enchantments drear,

Where more is meant than meets the ear,”

which were stock features of the romantic literature; although, on the other hand, they put wild improbabilities in the place of supernatural marvels, and revelled in coincidences and disguises almost as incredible as the Celtic magic of the trouvère.

Sidney the critic expounds in his Apologie for Poetry his view that the novel of his time and of all anterior times, together indeed with all literature having an imaginative and idealistic tendency, was comprehended under his definition of poetry.

“For Xenophon,” says he, “who did imitate so excellently as to give us the portraiture of a just Empire under the name of Cyrus, made therein an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagines and Cariclea. And yet both writ in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gowne maketh an Advocate.”

What his theory of poetry was may be gathered from his description of the poet, who,

“disdayning to be tied to any such subjection (as the natural rules of things), lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, dooth growe in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anewe, formes such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like; so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit. Nature never set the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.”

This corresponds to Bacon’s famous account of the nature of poetry, in the Advancement of Learning:—

“Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atque poetis, etc. It is taken in two senses in respect of words and matter. In the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter it is (as hath been said) one of the principal parts of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.

“The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.”

These definitions are too broad for poetry, and too narrow for imaginative literature in general, though that is what they aimed to define. It was as difficult for Sidney and Bacon as for Aristotle to propound a theory embracing literary forms that were not yet invented; and furthermore it is probable that had they witnessed the birth of naturalism in Defoe, or its ultimate developments in our own age, they would have denied to it the name of literature or art. But there is no place in such a definition for many works that neither Sidney nor Bacon would have hesitated to admit, the novels of George Eliot, for instance, or those of Fielding. Yet a modern explanation of poetry, that of Newman, would not exclude even such prose works as these. He says,

“Moreover, by confining the attention to one series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect, completes the dependance of the parts one on another, and harmonises the proportions of the whole.”

A stricter analysis, however, demands of poetry not only a distinctive mode of conceiving its subject, but a distinctive mode of utterance. If poetry is the fine art of words, and its aim to give all the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual delight of which words are capable, it is clear that Sidney and Bacon gave full weight to only one side of the truth, and that they included far too much. The poetic novel, to which their definition applied so aptly, is a case in point, since it was a hybrid and transitional form, a thing that was just ceasing to be poetry, but had not yet become the new form of art to which it was the harbinger.

The Arcadia, and the same may be said of the Elizabethan novel generally, shows its near relationship to poetry in both ways, in its style and in the purely imaginative nature of the story, the characters, and the life depicted. In the introduction to Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, published in this series, I compared the opening of Defoe’s stories, Robinson Crusoe, for instance, so definite as to time and place, so particular in the mention of names and the exact circumstances in which the events occur, with the beginning of the Arcadia, which carries us at once away in imagination to a flowery meadow in a land of Arcady that has no existence save in the fancy of the poets and those under their spell. There is no effort to make the story credible, or the characters real, by attaching them with the bands of verisimilitude to the world of familiar things. Musidorus and Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea, Zelmane and Amphialus, are in no way studies from life, but embodiments of Sidney’s chivalrous energy and thirst for action, and of the craving for a life of pastoral simplicity and ideal love, strengthened by his enforced existence amidst the pomps and unrealities of a court. While he was living in retirement at Wilton, where the Arcadia was begun, he gave vent to this feeling in the following lines:—

“Well was I while under shade

Oaten reeds me music made,

Striving with my mates in song;

Mixing mirth our songs among.

Greater was the shepherd’s treasure

Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.”

How strenuous in his nature was the heroic energy that gave the chivalric strain to his romance, was shown pre-eminently in the closing scenes of his life, when he roused his uncle Leicester out of his sloth, and sacrificed himself on the field to a sense of knightly punctilio. It has been said of him that his whole life was “a true poem, a composition, and pattern of the best and honourablest things”; and not only in his shepherd Philisides, but in all the idealisms of courage, knightly faith and honour, and self-denying affection, that illumine the pages of his Arcadia, and in their splendid deeds of valour and endurance, he poured out the riches of his own nature, as the poet puts all that is best in himself into his verse. His purpose in writing the Arcadia, according to the testimony of his old schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, was moral and didactic; but “in all these creatures of his making his interest and scope was to turn the barren philosophic precepts into pregnant images of life,” that is, to energize them with poetry.

The prose naturally begotten of such a poetical conception of the novel is well illustrated in the following passage, one of those most charged with humanity and most free from extravagance.

“But the headpiece was no sooner off but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which, with the face, soon known by the badge of excellency, witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in despite of the past sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her roundly, sweetly-smelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed her neighbour death; in her cheeks, the whiteness striving, by little and little, to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck—a neck indeed of alabaster—displaying the wound which with most dainty blood laboured to crown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of an unaffected languishing; though these things, to a grossly conceiving sense, might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looking upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.”

In the Apologie for Poetry, Sidney condemned Euphuism, Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated circles immediately upon the publication of Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry, and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his contemporaries:—

“Mirus prorsus homo, immo semideus, vel certe Deus, qui magnae artis subtilitate tantum efferavit argentum … ut diem suum sibi domus faciat, licet sole nolente: sic cubicula, sic porticus, sic ipsae valvae fulgurant.”

“Namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum, et inaccessa salebritate lubricum, mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat: qui statim proni foraminis lacunis editi, perque proclive delapsi, et angusti canalis exerto contecti tramite, proximam convallem latenter incidebant.”

Apuleius might very well have written such a sentence as this:—

“Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object that at first it did but hit flatlong. But little availed that, since the lady falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword with another blow to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.”

And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such extravagances as this:—

“Exceedingly sorry for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that exceedingness in fear for Philoclea.”

The fact is, there are bound to be these freaks and extravagances whilst a style is still in such an inchoate and experimental state as English prose was in from the time of Malory and Berners, and the other early architects of a style unfettered by metre, with whom, as Mr John Dover Wilson has shown in his work on John Lyly, the germs of Euphuism found their way into English long before Guevara was known in this country, although the tendency is nearly always attributed to his influence. The writers of this period could not evolve even a poetic prose without falling into these pitfalls, for the simple reason that they wrote a century before the principles of what may be called a normal prose style had been determined. Mr Watts-Dunton has pointed out that in the present age there is another kind of poetic prose in process of evolution, a prose “which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry.” Prose to be truly poetical, he argues, must move far away from the “tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin,” and must no doubt be something very different from what Sidney and other writers made of Elizabethan prose, noble as their achievement was.

“It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet’s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars.”

Such a prose as this must be the very latest product of literary effort. Its difference from the poetic prose actually evolved in the transitional age with which we are dealing, is the difference between an art founded on long experience and many attempts and failures, and above all on a sound philosophy of aesthetic causes and effects, and the essays of men who were not yet clear as to the objects they ought to aim at. So uncertain was Sidney even as to the true genius of English poetry that he was one of the most ardent members of the “Areopagus,” who endeavoured to reform English poetry on Italian and classical principles, the results of which attempt may be appraised in the verses inserted in the Arcadia. The indispensable basis for a sound poetic prose, if such a thing is feasible, must be a satisfactory norm of unpoetic prose.

Sidney’s romance did not escape ridicule in his own time; Ben Johnson parodied Arcadianism in Every Man out of his Humour; Dekker poked fun at Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen in the Gul’s Horne-book; and the involved and careless construction of the story came in for mild satire in one of the earliest burlesques of chivalrous and pastoral romances, Sorel’s Berger Extravagant, which was translated by John Davies of Kidwelly in a book that may be remembered by its sub-title, the Anti-Romance. The criticism in the passage following is not particularly acute, but is cited because few readers of Sidney are likely to come across such a very rare work as this translation (1648).

“Nor hath England wanted its Arcadia, whereof it is not long since we have had the translation. I find no more order in that than in the rest, and there are many things whereof I am not at all satisfied. At the very beginning you have the complaints of the shepherds Strephon and Claius upon the departure of Urania, without telling us who she was, nor whither she went. Now an author ought never to begin his book but he should mention the persons principally concerned in the history whose actions he is to raise up beyond any of the rest; yet this man makes afterward no more mention of these two shepherds than if he had never named them; and though he bring them in again at some sports before Basilius, yet that signifies nothing, since a man finds no period of their adventures, and that those verses wherein they speak of their loves are so obscure that they may be taken for the oracles of a Sybill. It is true that Sir Philip dying young might have left his work imperfect; but there’s no reason why we should suffer by that misfortune, and be obliged to take a thing for perfect because it might have been made so.”

… Thus Clarimond in his “Oration against Poetry, Fables, and Romances”; Philiris in his “Vindication” replies:—

“As for Sidney’s Arcadia, since it hath crossed the sea to come and see us, I am sorry Clarimond receives it with such poor compliments. If he hears nothing of the loves of Strephon and Claius, he must not quarrel with the author who hath made his book one of the most excellent in the world. There are discourses of love and discourses of state so generous and pleasant that I should never be weary to read them. I should say much in his commendation were I not in haste to speak of Astraea, which Clarimond brings in next, and I am very glad to find that book generally esteemed, which should oblige him to esteem it also.”

Sorel’s Berger Extravagant appeared in 1628. Two French translations of the Arcadia had already been made, one by Baudoin in 1624, and a second by D. Geneviefve, Chappelain, the year following. The book was translated into German in 1629, by Valentinus Theocritus, whose translation was revised by Martin Opitz, and appeared again in 1643 and 1646.

It would be rash to assert that the Arcadia, not published until 1590, though circulated widely in manuscript during the preceding decade, had any influence on the pastorals of Greene and Lodge, who boasted their adherence to the linguistic fashions set in 1579 by Lyly’s Euphues. It is enough to observe that these and the Arcadia have many close resemblances which are proofs of a common ancestry. Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), the original of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, his Menaphon (1589), and Philomela (1592); and Lodge’s Rosalynde: Euphues’ golden legacie (1590), whence As you like it was derived, have the Arcadian scenes and the atmosphere of fairy-land, combined with the same strain of chivalrous adventure, and the same complicated love-plots as Sidney’s romance. I venture to quote from Professor Courthope’s History of English Poetry a passage emphasising the strong feminine interest which was such a prominent feature in Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, as well as in Sidney.

“But after all, the element in the Arcadia which produced the greatest effect upon contemporary taste, on account of the dramatic tendencies of the age, was the one which Sidney derived from his study of Montemayor. Perhaps the most noticeable feature in the story is the complete elimination of the magical and supernatural machinery which formed so important a part of the older romances. In imitation of Montemayor, Sidney now concentrated the main interest of his narrative in the complications of the love-plots. The consequence of this device was to bring the exhibition of female character into greater prominence. In the old chivalric poetry and fiction no more than three types of women are represented, the insipid idol of male worship who shows ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ to her lover, according to the regulation pattern of the Cours d’Amour; the fickle mistress, like Cressida, who is inconstant to one lover, and so violates the code of chivalry; and the unfaithful wife of the class of Guinevere and Iseult. The Arcadia, on the other hand, is full of feminine heroines, martyrs, and monsters, each of whom plays her own distinct part in the development of the action. There is the ideal maiden, Pamela or Philoclea, type of lofty virtue, forerunner of the Clarissas and Belindas of Richardson; the vicious Queen Cecropia recalling the Phaedras and Sthenobaeas of Greek legend; Gynecia, the passion-stricken wife of a respectable elderly husband, a favourite figure in the modern French novel; the clownish Mopsa, the original, perhaps, of Shakespeare’s Audrey; and, above all, the representative of adventurous, unhappy, self-sacrificing love in its various aspects, Helen, Queen of Corinth, Parthenia, and Zelmane, predecessors of Shakespeare’s Viola, Helena, and Imogen.”

The popularity of the book, rivalling that of Euphues, is illustrated by the number of editions, of which a list will be given later. Sidney found writers eager to continue the story, and many imitators. The argument of John Day’s Ile of Guls (1606) was “a little string or rivolet drawne from the full streme of the right worthy gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydney’s well knowne Archadea.” Shirley dramatised many episodes in his Pastorall called the Arcadia (1640); the story of the dispossessed king of Paphlagonia and his son is probably the germ of Shakespeare’s episode of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear, and Mr C. Crawford has found traces of copying in the Duchess of Malfi and other plays of Webster. The author of the Emblemes, Francis Quarles, made a long poem out of the story of Argalus and Parthenia (1622); and other writers linked their compositions to the popularity and prestige of the Arcadia by using Sidney’s name as their advertisement, like the author of Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania (1606), a philosophical poem dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and the Lady Mary Wroath, a niece of Sidney, who produced a slavish imitation in The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania (1621), and made great play with her pedigree on the title-page. Excerpts and adaptations were published right down to the late seventeenth century.

The first edition of the Arcadia was published in 1590, four years after the author’s death. He did not finish the book, which had been begun for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was in exile from the court and living at Wilton House, the seat of the Pembrokes. It was Sidney’s dying request that the manuscript should be destroyed, and the dedicatory epistle to his sister expresses how little he valued the book as a literary performance:—

“If you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh error in the balance of good-will, I hope for the father’s sake it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being a trifle, and that triflingly handled.”

The Arcadia was entered in the Register of the Stationer’s Company in 1588, by William Ponsonbie, the publisher of Spenser’s Fairie Queene; and the first edition saw the light in a thick quarto in 1590. A photo-lithographic reproduction of this handsome first edition was published in 1891 by Dr Oskar Sommer, to whose scholarly bibliographical introduction I am indebted for the following list of the various editions. The fourth and fifth books, and a portion of the third book (57 pages), were added in the second edition, in 1593, a folio, by the same publisher. Beyond this, there are few variations in the text of the two editions. The third edition (1598), also by Ponsonbie, comprised Sidney’s Sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence of Poesie; and these works were again included in the fourth edition (misdescribed as the third) by Robert Waldegrave, at Edinburgh, in 1599.[2] Mathew Lownes’ edition (1605), the fifth (miscalled the fourth), is almost a facsimile reprint of the third; but in the next edition, described on the title-page as the fourth (1613), we get some new “additions,” but of small importance compared with those in the seventh (described in the title as the fifth), published in 1621 at Dublin, which included a “Supplement of a defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. Alexander,” which had been printed separately at Dublin the same year. In the present edition his supplement begins on [page 428] and ends on [page 451], where Sir William’s apologie for the liberty taken is duly quoted. Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards Earl of Stirling, was a poet and dramatist, and a statesman of genius, who died in 1610. He was a friend of Drummond of Hawthornden. The Dictionary of National Biography states wrongly that he published this continuation of the third book of the Arcadia in 1613, the date of the so-called fourth edition, certain copies of which have extracts from this work inserted. The first London edition, to which Sir William Alexander’s supplement was added, was the eighth, published in 1623; but it is doubtful whether the additional matter was really printed as a part of the volume, or added from the 1621 edition, or some other of which there is no trace, to the only copy of this issue known to Dr Sommer. The pagination, at any rate, is in a confused state pointing to this.

The sixth book of the Arcadia by Richard Beling (see infra [p. 631]), first published at Dublin, in 1624, was added to the ninth edition, miscalled the sixth, in 1627. It is not mentioned on the title, but before this new supplement another title-page is inserted, running as follows, “A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: written by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne Esquire. (Sat, si bene; si male, nimium.) London, printed by H. L. and R. Y. 1628,” thus dating a year later than the title-page proper. After Beling’s continuation come the Sonnets, the Defence of Poesie, Astrophel, etc. This edition was reprinted in exact conformity, except that the new title-page mentions the work of Beling, in 1629; and the five other seventeenth-century editions, appearing in 1633, 1638, 1655, 1662, and 1674, corresponded exactly in all textual respects but the title-page, except that in the twelfth, described as the ninth, edition (1638), an alternative supplement to a defect in the third book is introduced by Mr Ja. Johnstone, “Scoto-Brit,” and in addition to this the 1655 edition contained the forty-eight couplets entitled “A Remedie for Loue,” and an alphabetical table, or clavis, forming an index to the stories in the Arcadia.

Dr Sommer mentions only one edition in the eighteenth century, one in three volumes containing also the poetical works and the Defence of Poesy, and described as the fourteenth edition, although fifteen previous editions have now been enumerated. The title of the first volume is dated 1725, but the other two volumes bear that of the preceding year, the preliminary matter of the first not having, apparently, been completed in 1724. This was a London edition, and Dr Sommer was not aware of another seventeenth century edition, printed at Dublin in 1739, which was a reproduction of this one: it bears the imprint, “Dublin: printed by S. Powell, for T. Moore, at Erasmus’s Head in Dame Street, Bookseller, MDCCXXXIX”; and a copy has been used in preparing the present edition.

The only edition of the Arcadia in the nineteenth century, with the exception of the photographic reproduction of the first edition by Dr Sommer, was published by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, in 1867, and was preceded by an introductory essay by Hain Friswell, the author of The Gentle Life, who says:—

“The principle on which this edition of the Arcadia has been put through the press perhaps needs some explanation. As the sheets of MS. left the hands of Sidney, after the first book, or perhaps two, had been completed, they were transmitted to his sister the Countess of Pembroke, and some of them mislaid and lost. Hence one great hiatus supplied by Sir William Alexander, others by R(ichard) B(eling) and Mr Johnstone. It is also known that the Countess of Pembroke added to the episodes, adventures, and strange turns, at least in all the later books. Hence there is to be met with an Arcadian undergrowth which needs much careful pruning; and this undertaken, with needful compression, will leave the reader all that he desires of Sidney’s own. Growing like certain fanciful parasites upon forest trees, on the books of the Arcadia are certain eclogues of laboriously-written and fantastical poetry, some in Latin measures, against which Walpole was right to protest, and anent which Pope said:—

‘And Sidney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet.’

“These have been boldly removed without any loss, it is believed, to the romance; lastly, long episodes of no possible use to the book, which we think have been supplied by other hands than Sidney’s have, whilst using their very words and phrases, been cut down. Tedious excrescences have thus been removed, but it is to be hoped with judgment, so that the reader gets all we think is Sidney’s, and without curb put upon his utterance.”

In the edition now offered to the student of Elizabethan literature an opposite method has been adopted. Rather than run any risk of omitting anything that is Sidney’s, it has been thought advisable to give the whole Arcadia, excrescences and all, especially as the additions of those who were fellow-spirits and admirers, and belonged to the same great epoch, cannot be without their interest to readers in the present age, who may, at any rate, skip the contributions of Alexander and Beling if they are so minded. The example of Hain Friswell has been followed, however, so far as the modernisation of the spelling and punctuation is concerned. “A Continuation of Sir P. Sidney’s Arcadia written by a young Gentlewoman” (Mrs A. W. Weames), and published at London, in 1651, and James Johnstone’s “Supplement to a defect in the Third Book,” which is merely an alternative to Alexander’s, are not included.

There was a modernised edition of the Arcadia published in 1725, under the title, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Moderniz’d by Mrs Stanley, London, Printed in the Year MDCCXXV”; and there were extracts from the book, like the abstract entitled, “The Famous History of Heroick Acts or the Honour of Chivalry,” London, 1701; and two versions of the episode of Argalus and Parthenia, the first, “The Unfortunate Lovers: the History of Argalus and Parthenia” (fourth edition, 1715), and “The History of Argalus and Parthenia. Being A Choice Flower Gathered out of Sir Philip Sidney’s Rare Garden,” c. 1770 and 1780. Dr Grosart included all the poems occurring in the Arcadia in his edition of “The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney,” in three volumes, in 1877. Students of our old texts owe an immense debt to Dr Sommer for the pains and industry lavished on his sumptuous facsimile editions of Caxton’s Malory and Sidney’s Arcadia, in both of which the comparison of all the extant readings has been carried out with microscopic thoroughness, and done once for all.

E. A. B.

January 1907.

THE LIFE OF
Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, Kt.

[From the Dublin edition, 1739.]

This Marcellus of the English nation, Sir Philip Sidney, the short-lived ornament of his noble family, hath deserved, and, without dispute or envy, enjoyed, the most exalted praises of his own, and of succeeding ages. The poets of his time, especially Spenser, reverenced him, not only as a patron, but a master; and he was almost the only person in any age, I will not except Mecaenas, that could teach the best rules of poetry, and most freely reward the performances of poets. He was a man of a sweet nature, of excellent behaviour, of much, and, withal, of well-digested learning, so that rarely wit, courage, breeding, and other additional accomplishments of conversation, have met in so high a degree in any single person.[3]

Sir Henry Sidney, his father, was a man of excellent natural wit, large heart, sweet conversation; and such a governor as sought not to make an end of the state in himself, but to plant his own ends in the prosperity of his country. Witness his sound establishments, both in Wales and Ireland, where his memory is worthily grateful unto this day.

On the other side, his mother, as she was a woman, by descent, of great nobility (the Lady Mary, eldest daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland), so was she by nature of a large ingenious spirit.[4] He was born at Penshurst, in the county of Kent, on the 29th day of November, in the year 1554, and had his Christian name given him by his father, from King Philip, then lately married to Queen Mary. While he was very young, he was sent to Christ Church College in Oxford to be improved in all sorts of learning; where continuing till he was about seventeen years of age under the tuition of Dr Tho. Thornton, canon of that house, he was, in June 1572, sent to travel; for on the 24th of August following, when the massacre fell out at Paris, he was then there, and at that time, as I conceive, he, with other Englishmen, did fly to the house of the ambassador from the Queen of England.[5] Thence he went through Lorraine, and by Strasburg and Heidelburg to Frankfort, in September or October following, where he settles, is entertained agent for the Duke of Saxony, and an underhand minister for his own king. Lodged he was in Wechel’s house, the printer of Frankfort.[6] Here he was accompanied by the famous Hubert Languet; and in the next spring, 1573, Languet removed to Vienna, where our author met him again, and stayed with him till September, when he went into Hungary and those parts. Thence he journeyed into Italy, where he continued all the winter following, and most of the summer, 1574, and then he returned into Germany with Languet; and the next spring he returned by Frankfort, Heidelburg, and Antwerp, home into England, about May 1575.

In the year 1576 he was sent by the Queen to Rodolph, the Emperor, to condole the death of Maximilian, and also to other princes of Germany; at which time he caused this inscription to be written under his arms, which he then hung up in all places where he lodged:—

“Illustrissimi et generosissimi viri

Philipi Sidnaei, Angli,

Pro-regis Hiberniae filii, Comitum Warwici

Et Leicestriae Nepotis, serenissimi

Reginae Angliae ad Caesarem legati.”

The next year, 1577, in his return, he saw that gallant Prince Don John de Austria, Viceroy of the low countries for the King of Spain, and William, Prince of Orange; by the former of which, though at first he was lightly esteemed upon the account of his youth, yet, after some discourse, he found himself so stricken with him that the beholders wondered to see what tribute that brave and high-minded prince paid to his worth, giving more honour and respect to him, in his private capacity, than to the ambassadors of mighty princes.

In the year 1579 he, though neither magistrate nor counsellor, did show himself, for several weighty reasons, opposite to the Queen’s matching with the Duke of Anjou, which he very pithily expressed by a due address of his humble reasons to her, as may be fully seen in a book called “Cabala” (Part III., p. 201). The said address was written at the desire of some great personage—his Uncle Robert, I suppose, Earl of Leicester, upon which a great quarrel happened between him and Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford. This, as I conceive, might occasion his retirement from Court next summer, 1580, wherein, perhaps, he wrote that pleasant romance called “Arcadia.”[7]

In 1581 the treaty of marriage was renewed, and our author, Sidney, with Fulke Greville,[8] were two of the tilters at the entertainment of the French Ambassador; and at the departure of the Duke of Anjou from England, in February of the same year, he attended him to Antwerp.[9]

On the 8th of January 1582 he, with Perigrine Bertie, received the honour of knighthood from the Queen, and in the beginning of 1585 he designed an expedition with Sir Francis Drake into America, but being hindered by the Queen (in whose opinion he was so highly prized that she thought the Court deficient without him) he was, in October following, made Governor of Flushing—about that time delivered to the Queen for one of the cautionary towns—and General of the Horse. In both which places of great trust his carriage testified to the world his wisdom and valour, with addition of honour to his country by them; and especially the more, when in July 1586 he surprised Axil, and preserved the lives and honour of the English army at the enterprise of Gravelin: so that whereas (through the fame of his high deserts) he was then, or rather before, in election for the Crown of Poland, the Queen of England refused to further his advancement, not out of emulation, but out of fear to lose the jewel of her times. What can be said more? He was a statesman, soldier, and scholar—a complete master of matter and language, as his immortal pen shows. His pen and his sword have rendered him famous enough: he died by the one, and by the other he will ever live as having been hitherto highly extolled for it by the pens of princes. This is the happiness of art, that although the sword doth achieve the honour, yet the arts do record it, and no pen hath made it better known than his own in that book called “Arcadia.” Certain it is, he was a noble and matchless gentleman, and it may be justly said, without hyperbole or fiction, as it was of Cato Uticensis, that “he seemed to be born to that only which he went about.” His written works are these:—

The Countess of Pembroke’s “Arcadia,”[10] which being the most celebrated romance that was ever written, was consecrated to his noble, virtuous, and learned sister Mary, the wife of Henry, Earl of Pembroke, who, having lived to a very fair age, died in her house in Aldersgate Street, in London, the 25th of September 1621, whereupon her body was buried in the cathedral church of Salisbury, among the graves of the Pembrochian family. This “Arcadia,” though then, and since, it was, and is, taken into the hands of all ingenious men, and said by one living at, or near, the time when first published, to be “a book most famous for rich conceits and splendour of courtly expressions.” This work was first printed in the year 1613 in quarto; it hath been translated into French, Dutch, and other languages in 1624.

Besides Astrophel and Stella,[11] A Remedy for Love, The Defence of Poesy,[12] Sonnets, etc., Sir Philip also turned the Psalms of David into English verse, which are in manuscript in the library of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, curiously bound in a crimson velvet cover, left thereunto by his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke.[13]

The following dialogue, composed by our author, was spoken between two shepherds in a pastoral entertainment before several gentlemen and ladies at the seat of the noble family above mentioned.

Will. Dick, since we cannot dance, come, let a cheerful voice

Show that we do not grudge at all, when others do rejoice.

Dick. Ah, Will, though I grudge not, I count it feeble glee,

With sight made dim with daily tears, another’s sport to see.

Whoever lambkins saw (yet lambkins love to play)

To play when that their loved dams are stoll’n or gone astray?

If this in them be true, as true in men, think I,

A lustless song, forsooth, thinks he, that hath more lust to cry.

Will. A time there is for all, my mother often says,

When she, with skirts tuck’d very high, with girls at stoolball plays.

When thou hast mind to weep, seek out some smoky room:

Now let those lightsome sights we see, thy darkness overcome.

Dick. What joy the joyful sun gives unto bleared eyes,

That comfort in these sports you like, my mind his comfort tries.

Will. What! is thy bagpipe broke? or are thy lambs miswent?

Thy wallet or thy tar-box lost? or thy new raiment rent?

Dick. I would it were but thus, for thus it were too well.

Will. Thou seest my ears do itch at it; good Dick, thy sorrow tell.

Dick. Hear then, and learn to sigh; a mistress I do serve,

Whose wages make me beg the more, who feeds me till I starve,

Whose livery is such, as most I freeze apparelled most,

And look! so near unto my cure, that I must needs be lost.

Will. What? these are riddles sure; art thou then bound to her?

Dick. Bound as I neither power have, nor would have power to stir.

Will. Who bound thee?

Dick. Love, my lord.

Will. What witnesses thereto?

Dick. Faith in myself, and worth in her, which no proof can undo.

Will. What seal?

Dick. My heart deep graven.

Will. What made the band so fast?

Dick. Wonder, that by two so black eyes the glittering stars be past.

Will. What keepeth safe thy band?

Dick. Remembrance is the chest

Lock’d fast with knowing that she is of worldly things the best.

Will. Thou late of wages ’plainst: what wages mayst thou have?

Dick. Her heav’nly looks, which more and more do give me cause to crave.

Will. If wages make you want, what food is that she gives?

Dick. Tear’s drink, sorrow’s meat, wherewith, not I, but in me my death lives.

Will. What living get you then?

Dick. Disdain; but just disdain:

So have I cause myself to plain, but no cause to complain.

Will. What care takes she for thee?

Dick. Her care is to prevent

My freedom with show of her beams, with virtue my content.

Will. God shield us from such dames. If so our downs be sped

The shepherds will grow lean, I trow, their sheep will be ill fed;

But, Dick, my counsel mark: run from the place of woe;

The arrow being shot from far doth give the smaller blow.

Dick. Good Will, I cannot lack the good advice, before

That foxes leave to steal, because they find they die therefore.

Will. Then, Dick, let us go hence, lest we great folks annoy;

For nothing can more tedious be, than ’plaint in time of joy.

Dick. Oh, hence! O cruel word! which even dogs do hate;

But hence, even hence, I must needs go—such is my dogged fate.

To return again to Sir Philip.

In the year 1586,[14] when that unfortunate stand was made against the Spaniards before Zutphen, the 22nd of September, while he was getting upon the third horse, having had two slain under him before, he was wounded with a musket shot out of the trenches, which broke the bone of his thigh. The horse he rode upon was rather furiously choleric than bravely proud, and so forced him to forsake the field, but not his back, as the noblest and fittest bier to carry a martial commander to his grave. In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle,[15] the general, was, and, being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but, as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle, which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” And when he had pledged this poor soldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim, where the principal surgeons of the camp attended for him. When they began to dress his wounds, he, both by way of charge and advice, told them that, while his strength was yet entire, his body free from fever, and his mind able to endure, they might freely use their art, cut, and search to the bottom; but if they should neglect their art, and renew torments in the declination of nature, their ignorance, or overtenderness, would prove a kind of tyranny to their friend, and, consequently, a blemish to their reverend science. With love and care well mixed they began the cure, and continued it some sixteen days, with such confidence of his recovery as the joy of their hearts overflowed their discretion, and made them spread the intelligence of it to the Queen, and all his noble friends here in England, where it was received, not as private, but public good news.

At the same time Count Hollock was under the care of a most excellent surgeon for a wound in his throat by a musket shot, yet did he neglect his own extremity to save his friend, and to that end had sent him to Sir Philip. This surgeon, notwithstanding, out of love to his master, returning one day to dress his wound, the Count cheerfully asked him how Sir Philip did? and he answered, with a heavy countenance, that he was not well. At these words the worthy prince, as having more sense of his friend’s wound than his own, cries out: “Away, villain! never see my face again, till thou bring better news of that man’s recovery, for whose redemption many such as I were happily lost.”

Now, after the sixteenth day was passed, and the very shoulder-bones of this delicate patient worn through his skin with constant and obedient posturing of his body to the surgeon’s art, he, judiciously observing the pangs his wound stang him with by fits, together with many other symptoms of decay, few or none of recovery, began rather to submit his body to these artists than any farther to believe in them. He called the ministers unto him, who were all excellent men, of divers nations, and before them made such a confession of Christian faith as no book, but the heart, can truly and feelingly deliver. Then, calling for his will, and settling his worldly affairs, the last scene of this tragedy was the parting between the two brothers: the weaker showing infinite strength in suppressing sorrow, and the stronger, infinite weakness in expressing of it. And to stop the natural torrent of affection in both, Sir Philip took his leave, with these admonishing words: “Love my memory, cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator; in me, beholding the end of this world, with all her vanities.” And with this farewell, desired the company to lead him away.

After his death, which happened on the 16th of October, the states of Zealand became suitors to her majesty and his noble friends, that they might have the honour of burying his body at the public expense of their government.[16] This was not permitted; for soon after his body was brought to Flushing, and, being embarked with great solemnity on the 1st of November, landed at Tower Wharf on the 6th day of the same month. Thence it was conveyed to the Minories without Aldgate, where it lay in state for some time, till his magnificent funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, the 16th of February following, which, as many princes have not exceeded in the solemnity, so few have equalled in the sorrow for his loss. He was buried near to that place which his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, had designed (as I have heard) to be entombed in, without any monument or inscription. King James honoured him with an epitaph of his composition, and the Muses, both of Oxford and Cambridge, lamenting much for his loss, composed verses to his memory. Besides, several private persons did also exercise their fancies upon this occasion; for, so general was the lamentation, that it was accounted a sin for any gentleman of quality, for many months after, to appear at court or city in any light or gaudy apparel.

No monument hath since been erected over him, whereof this reason is assigned, that “He is his own monument, whose memory is eternised in his writings, and who was born into the world to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtues.”[17]

He left behind him a daughter named Elizabeth, who was born in 1585. She married Roger Mannours, Earl of Rutland, but died without issue.[18]

I confess it is commonly reported that Sir Philip,[19] some hours before his death, enjoined a near friend to consign these his works to the flames, whereby posterity had been deprived of much pleasure and profit accruing thereby. What promise his friend returned herein is uncertain; but if he broke his word to be faithful to the public good, posterity will absolve him, without doing any penance, for being guilty of such a meritorious offence, wherewith he hath obliged so many ages. Hear the excellent epigrammatist, Owen, hereon:—

“Ipse tuam moriens, vel conjuge teste, jubebas

Arcadiam saevis ignibus esse cibum.

Si meruit mortem, quia flammam accendit amoris;

Mergi, non Uri debuit iste liber.

In librum quaecunque cadat sententia; nullâ

Debuit ingenium morte perire tuum.”

As the ancient Egyptians presented secrets under their mystical hieroglyphics, so that an easy figure was exhibited to the eye, and a higher notion tendered under it to the judgment, so all the “Arcadia” is a continual grove of morality, shadowing moral and politic results under the plain and easy emblems of lovers, so that the reader may be deceived, but not hurt thereby, when surprised on a sudden to more knowledge than he expected.

I will not here endeavour to offer the reader a key to unfold what persons were intended under the fictitious denominations: herein must men shoot at the wild rovers of their own conjectures. And many have forged keys of their own fancies, all pretended to be the right, though unlike one to another. But, besides, it is an injury to impose guesses for truths on any belief; such applications, rather made than meant, are not without reflections on families, as may justly give distaste. I dare confidently aver that the wards of this lock are grown so rusty with time that a modern key will scarce unlock it, seeing in above a hundred years many criticisms of time, place, and person, wherein the life and lustre of this story did consist, are utterly lost, and unknown in our age.

Vita Philippi Sidnei.

“Qui dignos ipsi vitâ scripsere libellos

Illorum vitam scribere non opus est.

Sidnei in tumulo est, corpus non vita: Philippi

Producit vitam gloria, longa brevem.”

—Owen.

TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE
AUTHOR

Gulielmus Camdenus de Praelio inter Anglos et Hispanos prope Zutphaniam in Geldriâ.

Anno Dom. 1586.

“Ex Anglis pauci desiderati; sed qui instar plurimorum, Sidneius, equo perfosso dum alterum ascendit, glande femur trajectus,[20] vicesimo quinto post die, magno sui desiderio bonis relicto, in flore aetatis exspiravit, vix quatuor menses patri superstes. Cui Leicestrius avunculus in Angliam reversus, exequias, magno apparatu, et militari ritu, in Templo Sti. Pauli Londini solvit, Jacobus Rex Scotorum epitaphio parentavit: utraque Academia lacrymas consecravit, et Novum Oxoniae Collegium elegantissimum[21] Peplum contexuit. Haec et ampliora viri virtus, ingenium splendidissimum, eruditio politissima, moresque suavissimi meruerunt.”

Mr Carew, in his “Survey of Cornwall,” p. 102.

“Being a scholar at Oxford at fourteen years of age, and three years standing upon a wrong-conceived opinion touching my sufficiency, I was then called to dispute extempore with the matchless Sir Philip Sidney, in presence of the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, and divers other great personages.”[22]

Dr Heylin, in his “Cosmography.”

“Arcadia in Greece is a country whose fitness for pasturage and grazing hath made it the subject of many worthy and witty discourses, especially that of Sir Philip Sidney, of whom I cannot but make honourable mention. A book, which, 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.”

Mr Lloyd, in his “State Worthies.”

“His romance was but policy played with Machiavel in jest, and state maxims sweetened to a courtier’s palate. He writ men as exactly as he studied them; and discerned humours in the court with the same deep insight he described them in his book. All were pleased with his ‘Arcadia’ but himself, whose years advanced him so much beyond himself as his parts did beyond others. He condemned his ‘Arcadia,’ in his more retired judgment, to the fire, which wise men think will continue to the last conflagration. It was he whom Queen Elizabeth called her Philip,[23] the Prince of Orange his master, and whose friendship my Lord Brooks was so proud of that he would have no other epitaph on his grave than this:—

‘Here lieth Sir Philip Sidney’s friend.’”

Sir William Temple, in his “Essay on Poetry.”

“The true spirit or vein of ancient poetry, under the name of romance, 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 his virtues.”

Mr Lee, in his “Dedication of Caesar Borgia.”

To the Right Honourable Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery.

“My lord,—Your illustrious forefathers and, indeed, all your eminent relations, have always been of the first-rate nobility, patrons of wit and arms, magnificently brave, true old stampt Britons, and ever foremost in the race of glory. Not to unravel half your honourable records, I challenge all the men of fame to show an equal to the immortal Sidney, even when so many contemporary worthies flourished. I mean Sir Philip, true rival of your honour; one that could match your spirit; so most extravagantly great that he refused to be a king. He was at once a Caesar and a Virgil, the leading soldier, and the foremost poet. All after this must fail: I have paid just veneration to his name, and, methinks, the spirit of Shakespear pushed the commendation.”

Mr Philips, in his “Sixth Pastoral.”

“Full fain, O blest Eliza! would I praise

Thy maiden rule, and Albion’s golden days.

Then gentle Sidney liv’d, the shepherd’s friend;

Eternal blessings on his shade attend!”