sought as a remedy against the sorrows of the same, excess of delight must be granted to excess of sorrow, as excess of thirst requireth excess of drink; excess of hunger, excess of meat ; excess of grief, excess of pleasure: but excess of delight in this life is not to be sought, for fear of surfeit; therefore to cure the anguish of this life with such kind of pleasures as life pursues, is to measure the remedy by our own appetite, which indeed is nothing else but either to receive that that our sick stomach desireth, when it cannot judge; as to eat chalk in the green sickness; in an ague, pilchards; or as they that in some kind of leprosy drink poison, which is altogether hurtful to good complexions, yet worketh it accidentally some ease in them. Being once shipped in this part of philosophy, he is carried too far beyond his skill. (From Plays confuted.) SIR PHILIP SIDNEY [Sir Philip Sidney, born at Penshurst on 29th November 1554, was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, subsequently Lord Deputy in Ireland, and of his wife Mary, eldest daughter of the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, but left Oxford very young, in order to travel abroad. At the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, he was an inmate of Walsingham's house at Paris. Of his travels, which extended to Germany, Italy, and other European countries, and occupied something like four years, the most interesting memorial is his Latin correspondence with his companion during part of them, the celebrated Huguenot Hubert Languet. In 1576-7 he was again abroad, on a mission of ceremony to the Emperor Rudolf II. His withdrawal to Penshurst in the summer of 1580, which enabled him to write both The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (in his sister's honour), and The Defence of Poësy, must have been in some measure due to the very open part he had taken in opposing the marriageproject between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. But on the renewal of negotiations to this end in 1581 Sidney was conspicuous in doing honour to the French Embassy; and in the following year he was knighted by the Queen. She is said to have afterwards prevented his joining Drake in an American expedition, and to have interfered against his being offered the Polish Crown. But, not less fatally, she in 1585 appointed him Governor of the cautionary town of Flushing. During the siege of Zutphen, having volunteered his aid to an attempt at intercepting a Spanish convoy, he was mortally wounded, and died 17th October 1586. Sidney in 1583 married a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham; the Stella of his verse was Penelope Devereux, married in 1581 to Lord Rich.] THE inevitable application to Sidney of the phrase, “the Marcellus of English literature," is misleading, if not altogether meaningless. When his noble life had been sacrificed to the attractions of a futile coup de Balaclava, he was mourned at home in England, not only for what had been hoped from him, but for what he had already achieved. Still, it would be idle to deny that never has gallant warrior, true knight, or illustrious writer, been more fortunate than he in the opportunity of his death. To begin with, mutual sympathies were as yet stronger than antipathies in VOL. I 401 2 D the small but expanding world of English literature; and thus, although the Queen herself had honoured the good courtier she had lost, although English nobles were his pall-bearers, while his loss was lamented by the Seven Provinces which he had helped to protect, and acknowledged even by the archfoe whose name he bore, he had no mourners more justly in earnest than the scholars and poets that claimed him as one of themselves. For the soldier who had fallen on the field of honour, the statesman whom his own Sovereign had trusted and whom the Republic of a foreign kingdom had summoned to its throne, he too had been a citizen of that Arcadia where Imagination holds supreme sway; he too had not only taken joy in that Art of Poesy for which he had entered the lists, but had as a true student found in it compensation for the disappointments of life and love. But if Sidney's death thus fitly called forth the tears of the Muses and of their professed votaries, among them of the poet whose praise was in itself a pledge of literary immortality, neither should its coincidence with the beginning of a new era in our literary as well as our political history be overlooked. The year following on that of Sidney's death ended the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots; its successor in turn witnessed the catastrophe of the Spanish Armada. During these few years Spenser was already at work upon his masterpiece; in their course were published the first productions of nearly all his chief contemporaries among our epic and lyric poets; and to the same wonderful years belong the earlier plays of the most prominent among the immediate predecessors or older contemporaries of Shakespeare. How then could it have been otherwise than that the sudden extinction at such an epoch of a light which had shone forth with so brilliant a promise, should be lamented in strains appropriate to a truly national loss? Yet, apart from all adventitious circumstances of date, who shall deny that in Sir Philip Sidney, a fit "pride of shepherds' praise" was lost to the vocal Arcady around him? Concerning his verse it must suffice to say that the lyrical form introduced into English poetry by Surrey, and domesticated in it by Sidney and Spenser, would hardly have made so speedy and so sure a settlement but for the fact that neither the one nor the other scorned to pour his own golden soul into the alien literary mould. Nor was it far otherwise with the more imposing of the two prose works which, even more decisively than Astrophel and Stella, have secured to their author the unchallengeable rank of a national classic. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, written by Sidney at his sister's house as a rough draft for her diversion, some time in the years 1580 and 1581, although not printed till after his death in 1590, forms, of course, a mere link in the connected chain of modern pastoral literature. That chain may, without injustice to Politian, be said to begin with Sannazaro's Arcadia (1502), and to reach down through a series of successors to and beyond the name-sake works of Sidney and Lope de Vega. In their most salient features all these productions resemble one another. They seek alike to give prominence to those emotions which humanise and soften life in the midst of the very conflicts and troubles provided in part by themselves, and thus their effect is to exalt friendship and love, but the latter most conspicuously, as absorbing the sentiments of the personages within their range, together with most of the life they lead and of the time they kill. Hence the sameness and monotony characteristic of modern in a far greater measure than of ancient pastoral. Conversely, modern pastoral almost imperceptibly substituted its own ineffable artificiality of style for the naïveté (conscious only to the extent in which the play of children is such) of the Sicilian Muses. Vergil is as simple and natural as it is possible for an imitator to remain. In Sannazaro there lingers at least the pretence of a rustic tone; in Tasso and Guarini simplicity has become delicacy; the Spaniards refine upon the Italians, and in Sidney the pastoral dress has become a mere accepted costume. Indeed his shepherds are in the main confessedly nothing more than courtiers in retreat -"princely shepherds," as he calls them in their way hardly less conventional than their latest Louis Quinze successors. With the conventionalities of scenery and costume those of incident and character become permanently associated; we recognise as inevitable the disconsolate shepherd, the coy shepherdess, and the clown whose feats and feelings burlesque those of his superiors, although he "will stumble sometimes upon some songs that might become a better brain." Nor are we spared well-known stage tricks for setting off the stage figures, above all the familiar device of Echo repeating in moans and in puns the final syllables of lines of verse uttered among the rocks or trees. If in these respects Sidney's Arcadia must perforce be pronounced the reverse of original, neither is it possible to ignore the Euphuistic element in the style of the book, or the degree in which its initial success was due to this particular cause. Euphues, it must be remembered, had appeared in 1579, only a year before Sir Philip Sidney temporarily withdrew from the Court where no figure had shone more conspicuously than his own; and the Arcadia, though not printed till eleven years afterwards, was written under the influence of an extremely fashionable and easily imitable model. Probably what seemed choicest in the style of Sidney's work to its early admirers was what most closely resembled Euphues. "Oh," cries Master Fastidious Brisk in Every Man out of his Humour, when eulogising the "harmonious and musical strain of wit" in a great lady, "it flows from her like nectar . . . as I am an honest man, would I might never stir, sir, but she does observe as pure a phrase, and use as choice figures in her ordinary conferences, as may be in the Arcadia." And in the same play Fungoso, who "follows the fashion afar off, like a spy," says that, while waiting for his new suit of clothes, he will "sit in his old suit, or else lie a-bed, and read the Arcadia." Of the significant characteristics of Euphuism hardly one, unless it be a certain monotony of cadence quite out of keeping with the superior versatility of Sidney's literary genius, is altogether missing in his book. Although he is expressly praised by Drayton for disburdening our tongue of Lyly's favourite similes from natural history, or supposed natural history, yet "this word, Lover, did no less pierce poor Pyrocles, than the right tune of music toucheth him that is sick of the Tarantula"; and the Forsaken Knight bears as his impresa, or device, "a Catoblepas, which so long lies dead as the moon, whereto it hath so natural a sympathy, wants her light.” Nor was the author of the Arcadia proof against the seduction of mere tricks of sound, quite apart from the metrical experiments which furnish so moderate an enjoyment to his latter-day readers, and which need not be discussed here. Above all, full play is allowed to his intolerable fondness for puns, which a famous American historian calls "the only blemish in his character"; on the very first page of the romance, the very first Arcadian having used the adverb last regrets "that the word last should so long last." Nor can it be denied that notwithstanding the coherency and consequent interest as narratives of some of the interwoven episodes, such as that borrowed by Shakespeare for King Lear, the Arcadia in the general texture of its argument marks no material advance |