in the war of the Low Countries, and was due to a brilliant piece of bravado; he and his companions fighting (as at Balaclava in the Charge of the Light Brigade) where there was little hope of conquest. All round them -in front-in rear-in flank-the arquebuses and the cannon twanged and roared. They beat down the gunners; they sabred the menat-arms; thrice and four times they cut red ways through the beleaguering enemy; but at last, a cruel musket-ball came crashing through the thigh of this brave, polished gentleman -Philip Sidney-and gave him his deathwound. Twenty-five days he lingered, saying brave and memorable things-sending courteous messages, as if the sheen of royalty were still upon him-doing tender acts for those nearest him, and dying, with a great and a most worthy calm.

We may well believe that the Queen found somewhat to wipe from her cheek when the tale came of the death of "my Philip," the pride of her court. Leicester, too, must have minded it sorely: and of a surety Spenser in his far home of Kilcolman; writing there, maybe-by the Mulla shore-his apostrophe to Sidney's soul, so full of his sweetness and of his wonderful word-craft:

"Ah me, can so Divine a thing be dead? Ah no it is not dead, nor can it die

But lives for aye in Blissful Paradise: Where, like a new-born Babe, it soft doth lie In bed of Lilies, wrapped in tender wise

And compassed all about with Roses sweet And dainty violets, from head to feet. There-thousand birds, all of celestial brood To him do sweetly carol, day and night And with strange notes-of him well understood

Lull his asleep in an-gelic Delight

Whilst in sweet dreams, to him presented be Immortal beauties, which no eye may see."

Two black palls fling their shadows on the court of Elizabeth in 1587: Sidney died in October of 1586; and in the following February Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded. The next year the Spanish Armada is swept from the seas, and all England is given up to rejoicings. And as we look back upon this period and catch its alternating light and shade on the pages of the historians and in the lives of English poets and statesmen, the great Queen, in her ruff and laces, and with her coronet of jewels, seems somehow, throughout all, the central figure. We see Raleigh the Captain of her Guard-the valiant knight, the scholar,

the ready poet-but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately gallantries to her court: We see Sir Francis Drake, with his full beard and bullet-head-all browned with his long voyages, from which he has come laden with ingots of Spanish gold-swinging with his sailor-gait into her august presence: We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his-Francis Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen's hand and do service for favors which shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash, headstrong Oxford may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the affianced of Sidney: And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville, had contributed the best parts to the Mirror for Magistrates: Richard Hooker, too, may be there-come up from the "peace and privacy" of his country parsonage-in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but in the prime of his age and power, with the calm face and the severe philosophy with which he has confronted a termagant of a wife and the beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in London might have been found, in that day,

a young man, not much past twenty-just up from Stratford-upon-Avon—to take his part in playing at the Globe Theatre; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Stratford man may be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul's with his chin upon his hand-looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers of his-only creatures of his day-dreams; yet they are to carry his messages of wisdom into all lands and languages.

But I must shut the books where I see these figures come and go.

A

CHAPTER VII

s we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great Queen

Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Burleigh, whose nod has passed into history; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the judicious, the simpleminded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his—ever sweet, though ever so long. Then his friend Philip Sidney flashed across our view, the over-fine gentleman, yet full of nobility and courage, who wrote a long book, Arcadia, so bright with yellow splendor as to tire one; and still so full of high thinking as to warrant his fame and to lend a halo to his brave and tragic death. You may remember, too, that I made short mention of a certain John Lyly, who was about the same age with Spenser, and who, with his pretty euphuisms came to cut a larger figure in the days of Elizabeth than many stronger men did.