Upon the yielding herbage, (so they sing)
Then were not all effac'd: then speech profane,
And manners profligate, were rarely found;
Observed as prodigies, and soon reclaim'd."[550:A]
Had the disciples of Sir Philip adhered to the model which he constructed; had they, rejecting merely his unfortunate attempt to introduce the Roman metres into modern poetry, preserved his strength and animation in description, his beauty and propriety of sentiment, his variety and discrimination of character, the school of Sidney might have existed at the present hour. On the contrary, whatever was objectionable and overstrained in their prototype, they found out the art to aggravate; and by a monstrous and monotonous overcharge of character, by a bloated tenuity of style, by a vein of sentiment so quaintly exalted as to have nothing of human sympathy about it, and by an indefinite prolixity of fable, they contrived to outrage nature nearly as much as had been effected by the wonders of necromancy and the achievements of chivalry; and this, too, without producing a scintillation of those splendid traits of fancy which
illumine, and even atone for, the wild fictions of the Anglo-Norman romance. The Astrea of D'Urfé, written about twenty years after Sidney's work, though sufficiently tedious, and frequently unnatural, makes the nearest approach to the pastoral beauty of the Arcadia; but what longevity can attach to, or what patience shall endure, the numerous and prodigious tomes of Madame Scuderi?[551:A]
The shades of oblivion seem gathering fast even over the beautiful reveries of Sidney, a fate most undoubtedly hastened by the prolix and perverted labours of his successors; and what was the fashion and delight of the seventeenth century has generally ceased to charm. So great, indeed, was once the popularity of the Arcadia, that its effects became an object of consideration to the satirist and the historian. In 1631, we find the former thus admonishing the ladies:—"Insteade of songes and musicke let them learn cookerie and launderie. And instead of reading Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, let them reade the groundes of good huswifery."[551:B] But the grave annalist and antiquary, Fuller, has, with more good sense, vindicated the study of this moral romance:—"I confess," says he, "I have heard some of modern pretended wits cavil at the Arcadia, because they made it not themselves: such who say that his book is the occasion that many precious hours are otherwise spent no better, must acknowledge it also the cause that many idle hours are otherwise spent no worse than in reading thereof."[551:C] There is no work, in short, in the department of prose-fiction which contains more apothegmatic wisdom than the Arcadia of Sidney; and it is to be regretted that the volume which had charmed a Shakspeare, a Milton, and a Waller[551:D],
and which has been praised by Temple[552:A], by Heylin[552:B], and by Cowper, should be suffered, in any deference to the opinion of Lord Orford[552:C], to slumber on the shelf.
It is with pleasure, however, that we find a very modern critic not only passing a just and animated eulogium on the Arcadia, but asserting on his own personal knowledge, that, even in the general classes of society, it has still its readers and admirers. "Nobody, it has been said, reads the Arcadia. We have known very many persons who have read it, men, women, and children, and never knew one who read it without deep interest and admiration at the genius of the writer, great in proportion as they were capable of appreciating it. The verses are very bad, not that he was a bad poet, (on the contrary, much of his poetry is of high merit,) but because he was then versifying upon an impracticable system. Let the reader pass over all the eclogues, as dull interludes unconnected with the drama, and if he do not delight in the story itself, in the skill with which the incidents are woven together and unravelled, and in the Shakespearean power and character of language, with which they are painted; let him be assured the fault is in himself and not in the book."[552:D]
After this brief survey of the state of romantic literature, and of the various romances which were most popular, in the days of Shakspeare, it will be a proper appendage, if we add a few observations on the yet lingering relics of chivalric costume. That gorgeous spectacle, the Tournament, in which numerous knights engaged together