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SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

(1554-1586)

BY PITTS DUFFIELD

HEN I was a boy nine years old," says Aubrey the antiquary, "I was with my father at one Mr. Singleton's, an alderman and woollen draper, in Gloucester, who had in his parlour over the chimney the whole description of Sir Philip Sidney's funerall, engraved and printed on papers pasted together, which at length was, I believe, the length of the room at least. But he had contrived it to be twined upon two pinnes, that turning one of them made the figures march all in order. It did make such a strong impression on my young tender phantasy that I remember it as if it were but yesterday." The pageantry of Sir Philip Sidney's life and death is still potent to impress the tender fancy, young or old; it cannot be forgotten by anybody who to-day would meddle with the estimate put upon him by his contemporaries. That he was the embodied ideal of all the Elizabethan world held noble in life and art, there is an almost inconceivable amount of tribute to testify. All England and most of Europe went into mourning at his death; and while he lived, the name of Astrophel was one that poets conjured with. Bruno the philosopher, Languet the Huguenot, enshrined him in their affections; and Sir Fulke Greville the thinker, in the never-to-be-forgotten epitaph, was proud to remember that besides having been servant to Queen Elizabeth and counselor to King James, he had been also Sir Philip Sidney's friend.

The extraordinary charm of this celebrated personality is hardly to be accounted for completely by the flavor of high romance about him, or by attributing to him what nowadays has been called personal magnetism. Something of temperamental magic there must have been, to be sure; but even in his short life there was something also of distinct purpose and achievement. When in his thirty-second year-for he was born November 29th, 1554, and died October 5th, 1586- he received his death wound at the siege of Zutphen, he had already gained the reputation of more than ordinary promise. in statesmanship, and had made himself an authority in questions of letters. The results of modern scholarship seem to show, on the whole, that his renown was more richly deserved than subsequent opinion has always been willing to admit.

In the first place, Sidney's devotion to art was steadfast and sincere. Throughout his travels on the Continent, whether in the midst of the terrors of St. Bartholomew in Paris, or of the degenerative Italy, which for its manifold temptations old Roger Ascham declared a Circe's court of vice,— he held a high-spirited philosophy which kept him alike from evil and from bigotry. Dante and Petrarch more than any fleshly following were his companions in Italy. On the grand tour or in his foreign missions, as his writings always show, he was ever the true observer. In the splendors of Elizabeth's court-such as, for instance, the Kenilworth progress, which his uncle the Earl of Leicester devised for the gratification of the Queen's Majesty - he had always an eye for the romantic aspects of things, and a thought for the significance of them. The beautiful face in the Warwick Castle portrait-lofty with the truth of a soul that derives itself from Plato- cannot have been the visage of a nature careless of its intellectual powers or its fame; but of one most serious, as his friend Fulke Greville testifies, and strenuous in his public duty. The celebrated romance of 'Arcadia' — which he wrote for his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, in retirement at Penshurst, his birthplace, after his courageous letter of remonstrance to the Queen concerning the French match-is entirely the outcome of a mind that did its own thinking, and made even its idle thoughts suggestive in the study of the literature.

At first sight the Countess of Pembroke's 'Arcadia' may seem, indeed, but the "vain amatorious poem" which Milton condemned Charles I. for using upon the scaffold. Sidney himself might have called it a poem: for "it is not rhyming and versing," he says, "that maketh a poet; but it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by:" and he did call it, in his dedication, "an idle work," "a trifle and trifling handled." But it is to be noted that what Charles used of it was a prayer put originally in the mouth of Pamela, and that Dr. Johnson declared his use of it was innocent. Pamela also, in spite of the trifling diversions of Philip and his sister the Countess, has a way of pretty often growing eloquent on serious matters. "You say yesterday was as to-day," she exclaims. "O foolish woman, and most miserably foolish since wit makes you foolish, what does that argue but that there is a constancy in the everlasting governor ?" And Pamela's exposition of her faith, in Book iii., is more theology than many a trifler would care to read or write to-day. Altogether this elaborate compound of Spanish, Italian, and Greek pastoral, and romantic incident, has its fair share of the moral element which the English nature inevitably

craves.