Philip Sidney.
Meantime what has become of that Philip Sidney[93] who flashed upon us under the eyes of Elizabeth at the age of twenty-four? You know him as the chivalric soldier and the model gentleman. Students and young people all, who are under the glamour of youthful enthusiasms, are apt to have a great fondness for Philip Sidney: But if any of my young readers chance to be projecting an essay about that courteous gentleman—and I know they will, if they have not already—I would counsel them to forego any mention of the story about the dying soldier and the cup of water. It has been cruelly overworked already. Indeed it might have been matched in scores of cases upon the battle-fields of our own war: When the last shattering blow comes to our poor humanity, the better nature in us does somehow lean kindly out, in glance and in purpose. Yet Philip Sidney was certainly a man of great kindness and full of amiabilities and courtesies.
Why, pray, should he not have been? Consider that in all his young life he was wrapped in purple. It is no bad thing in any day to be born eldest son of an old and wealthy and titled family of England; but it is something more to be born eldest son of a Sidney—nephew to Leicester, prime favorite of the Queen, cousin to the Northumberlands, the Sutherlands, the Warwicks—heir to that old baronial pile of Penshurst, toward which summer loiterers go now, every year, from far-away countries—to admire its red roofs—its gray walls curtained with ivy—its tall chimneys, that have smoked with the goodly hospitalities of centuries—its charming wood-walks, that Ben Jonson and Spenser and Massinger have known—its courts and parterres and terraces, where “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” gathered posies—its far-reaching lovely landscape, with Penshurst church cropping out near by—blue, hazy heights off by Tunbridge—lanes bowered with hedge-rows—wide-lying wavy, grain-fields, and sheep feeding in the hollows of the hills. He was born heir to all this, I say, and had the best masters, the tenderest and the worthiest of mothers—who writes to him in this style,
“Your noble Father hath taken pains, with his own hand, to give you in this—His Letter—so wise precepts for you to follow with a diligent mind, as I will not withdraw your eyes from beholding, and reverent honoring the same—no, not so long a time as to read any letter from me: Wherefor—I only bless you—with my desire to God to plant in you his grace, and have always before your mind the excellent councils of my Lord, your dear Father: Farewell, my little Philip; and, once again, the Lord bless you!
“Your loving mother,
“Marie Sidney.”
Ought not a boy, with such a mother, and Penshurst in prospect, and cousinly relations with the Talbots and Howards and Stanleys to be gentlemanly and amiable? Then—his great-uncle—Leicester (who is Chancellor of the University) writes up to Oxford, where young Sidney is reading for his degree—“Pray have my boy, Philip Sidney, who is delicate, excused from fasting during Lent.” And there is a plot afoot to marry this young Oxford man to Anne, daughter of that Lord Burleigh I told you of, and there are letters about the negotiation still extant. Would you like to hear how Lord Burleigh discusses his daughter’s affairs?
“I have been pressed,” he says, “with kind offers of my lord of Leicester, and have accorded with him, upon articles (by a manner of A. B. C.) without naming persons—that—if P. S. and A. C. hereafter shall like to marry, then shall H. S. (father of P. S.) make assurances, etc., and W. C. [that’s Lord Burleigh] father of A. C. shall pay, etc.: What may follow, I know not: but meanwhile P. S. and A. C. shall have full liberty.”
What did follow was, that old Burleigh thought better of it, and married his daughter to a bigger title—that is Lord Oxford, a learned and elegant, but brutal man, who broke poor Anne Cecil’s heart.
Sidney, after his Oxford course, and another at Cambridge (as some authorities say) went—as was the further mode—upon his travels: and goes, with the same golden luck upon him, to the great house of Walsingham, ambassador of England, in Paris. Why not be gentle? What is to provoke? It is quite a different thing—as many another Cambridge man knew (Spenser among them), to be gentle and bland and forbearing, when illness seizes, when poverty pinches, when friends backslide, when Heaven’s gates seem shut;—then, amiability and gentleness and forbearance are indeed crowning graces, and will unlock, I think, a good many of the doors upon the courts, where the weary shall be at rest.