[238]. The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the Camden Society’s Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the later (1592) Four Letters, the embroidery of railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary canvas.
[239]. Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent Apology. I wish he had added the Ephemerides of Phialo which accompanied the Apology, and the Plays Confuted of three years later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add something to the controversy.
[240]. Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets (London, 1892).
[241]. Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868; Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.
[243]. Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his attitude is very different from theirs as a whole, and already significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.
[244]. Savonarola, v. sup., p. 20.
[245]. “I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”
[246]. “As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”
[247]. It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.