View from the Garden.
We describe it when we name his accomplishments; we remember it as we would a dream of uninterrupted glory. His learning, his beauty, his chivalry, his grace, shed a lustre on the most glorious reign recorded in the English annals. England herself, “by reason of the widespread fame of Sir Philip Sidney,” rose exalted in the eyes of foreign nations—he was the idol, the darling of his own. For with every sort of power at his command, it was his creed to think all vain but affection and honour, and to hold the simplest and cheapest pleasures the truest and most precious. The only displeasure he ever incurred at court was when he vindicated the rights and independence of English commoners in his own gallant person against the arrogance of English nobles in the person of the Earl of Oxford. For a time, then, he retired from the court, and sought rest in his loved simplicity. He went to Wilton; and there, for the amusement of his dear sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, he wrote, between the years 1579 and 1581, the “Arcadia,” a work whose strange fortune it has been to be too highly valued in one age, and far too underrated in another. Immediately after its publication it was received with unbounded applause. “From it was taken the language of compliment and love; it gave a tinge of similitude to the colloquial and courtly dialect of the time; and from thence its influence was communicated to the lucubrations of the poet, the historian, and the divine.” The book is a mixture of what has been termed the heroic and the pastoral romance, interspersed with interludes and episodes, and details the various and marvellous adventures of two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles. It was not intended to be published to the world, but was written merely to pleasure the Countess of Pembroke—“a principal ornament to the family of the Sidneys.” The famous epitaph, usually ascribed to the pen of Ben Jonson, though in reality, it appears, written by William Browne, the author of “Britannia’s Pastorals,” and preserved in a MS. volume of his poems in the Lansdowne Collection in the British Museum, although so well known, will bear repeating here:—
“Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister! Pembroke’s mother
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair, and learn’d, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee!
Marble piles let no man raise
To her name for after-days;
Some kind woman, born as she,
Reading this, like Niobe,
Shall turn marble, and become
Both her mourner and her tomb.”
Again, however, Sidney returned to court, and his queen seized every opportunity to do him honour. He received her smiles with the same high and manly gallantry, the same plain and simple boldness, with which he had taken her frowns. In the end, Elizabeth, who, to preserve this “jewel of her crown,” had forcibly laid hands on him when he projected a voyage to America with Sir Francis Drake, and placed her veto on his quitting England when he was offered the crown of Poland, could not restrain his bravery in battle when circumstances called him there. At Zutphen, on the 22nd of September, 1586, he received a mortal wound; and here occurred the touching incident to which, perhaps, more than to any other circumstance, Sir Philip is indebted for his heroic fame. It is thus related by his friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, Lord Broke:—“In his sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle, the general, was, and being thirsty from 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 been wounded at the same time, ghastly, casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered to the poor man with these words: ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.’ He lived in great pain for many days after he was wounded, and died on the 17th of October, 1586.” The close of his life affords a beautiful lesson. “Calmly and steadily he awaited the approach of death. His prayers were long and fervent; his bearing was indeed that of a Christian hero.” He had a noble funeral; kings clad themselves in garments of grief: a whole people grieved for the loss of the most accomplished scholar, the most graceful courtier, the best soldier, and the worthiest man of the country and the age. He was buried in state, in the old Cathedral of St. Paul, on the 16th of February. Both Universities composed verses to his memory, and so general was the mourning for him, that, “for many months after his death, it was accounted indecent for any gentleman of quality to appear at court or in the city in any light or gaudy apparel.”
We may place implicit faith in the testimony of the contemporaries of Sir Philip Sidney; and by all of them he is described as very near perfection. Their praises must have been as sincere as they were hearty; for his fortune was too poor to furnish him with the means to purchase them with other than gifts of kindly zeal, affectionate sympathy, cordial advice, and generous recommendations to more prosperous men. From Spenser himself we learn that Sidney
“First did lift my muse out of the floor.”
In his dedication of the “Ruins of Time” to Sidney’s sister, he speaks of her brother as “the hope of all learned men, and the patron of my young muse.” “He was,” writes Camden, “the great glory of his family, the great hope of mankind, the most lively pattern of virtue, and the darling of the learned world.”