following the fashion he had set them; but we find him writing to Queen Elizabeth in this doleful strain:

Thirteene years your highnes servant, but yet nothing; twenty freinds, that though they saye they wil be sure, I find them sure to be slowe. A thousand hopes, but all nothing; a hundred promises, but yet nothing. Thus casting vpp the inventory of my friends, hopes, promises and tymes, the summa totalis amounteth to iust nothing. My last will is shorter than mine invencion; but three legacies, patience to my creditors, melancholie without measure to my friends, and beggerie without shame to my family.

Lyly was also a dramatist of considerable merit. His most graceful play is "Campaspe."

Next in order comes the "mirror of knighthood”—the courtier, the soldier, the man of letters, the gentleman-so fondly mourned in his own times and remembered in all times-Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86). There have been others as noble, as gentle, as brave; but few had Sidney's advantage of combining with these qualities such literary ability as will carry down a name for centuries among the ranks of a country's most distinguished authors.

Everything was done for Sidney's education that wealth. and affection could furnish. After having gone through the usual course of intellectual training in England, he lived for a while in Paris, where he chose only the best and loftiest society. Being driven from that city by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, he travelled elsewhere on the continent, and brought home with him an added knowledge of other lands, united with a knowledge of men's hearts and motives which strengthened his ability to help direct the affairs of state. With this journey, which closed when he was twentyone year's old, Sidney's education may be considered finished. On his return to England he sprang into such sudden popularity as few men of his age have enjoyed. His fine manners, grace of carriage and personal beauty, together with elegant accomplishments and a playful wit, made him the observed of all observers. Queen Elizabeth

instantly received him with the highest favor and used jokingly to call him her Philip, as distinguished from the Pope's Philip-Philip II. of Spain, who had for a few disastrous years been the husband of her sister Mary. When he was three-and-twenty she entrusted him with a difficult and delicate mission to the Emperor of Germany. When he returned he was received by the queen with warm commendations. She was more than satisfied with the manner in which he had carried out her wishes, appointed him to the coveted office of cup-bearer, and gave him a lock of her hair. The great queen knew how to appreciate good sense and manly worth, especially when they were united to personal attractions.

It was now his turn to bestow favors as well as to receive them. People of all ranks flocked to the open doors of the youth of wealth and position, and the dedications of books, poems, etc. which he received were almost innumerable. About this time his friend Gabriel Harvey made him acquainted with the poet Edmund Spenser, and thus was formed a friendship honorable to both. Spenser passed many happy hours with his friend at Sidney's country seat of Penshurst in Kent, and the two pursued together those studies in which their souls delighted.

Sidney's principal literary work, the "Arcadia," he composed for his sister's pleasure, and called it "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." It is a prose-poem, where the characters are lords and ladies living in the country and enjoying its pleasures, without laying aside the elegance and refinement of courtly life. The moral tone is the highest possible, and the characters discourse to one another on topics both lofty and deep. It is to this romance that we owe the noble phrase, "They are never alone who are accompanied by noble thoughts." The story is, to our modern taste, tedious, and some of the "conceits" far-fetched and labored; but these were the faults of the age. Many

beautiful passages can be selected from the "Arcadia,” and Cowper has expressed no more than the truth when he speaks of "Sidney, warbler of poetic prose."

A work more in accord with modern ideas is the "Apologie for Poetrie," in which Sidney (who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1583 and must henceforth be called Sir Philip) warmly defended his favorite art against the attacks of the Puritan, Stephen Gosson, who wrote a book called "The School of Abuse" against plays and poetry, thinking the one mischievous, the other at least useless. Sidney's answer is the first piece of modern literary criticism, and is written in clear, readable English, while he especially condemns the affectations in language common at that time, and makes the shrewd remark, "It is not rhyming that maketh the poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate."

Sidney's poetry consists mostly of sonnets, written to a lady whom he calls Stella (a star), while he figures himself under the name of Astrophel (lover of a star). The Stella of his muse is supposed to have been Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of his old friend the Earl of Essex. His own wife was a daughter of Elizabeth's minister, Sir Francis Walsingham. The sonnets are graceful and musical, and in each one there is some pleasing thought or quaint conceit. In one of them occurs the well-known expression, addressed to himself when he did not know what to say, "Fool! Look into thine heart and write!" His fame, however, rests upon his prose, which was beyond that of any other English writer up to his time.

While Sidney was thus amusing his leisure hours with. literature, he was at the same time busy with public affairs, and was from time to time employed in the queen's service. He wished to go with Drake on one of his enterprises against the West Indies. He had made all of his preparations secretly, for fear of being forbidden, when Drake

sent a hint of his intentions to the queen, who laid her commands on him to stay where he was, saying she could not afford to risk "the jewel of her times" in such an enterprise. He was bitterly disappointed, and Elizabeth -consoled him, as far as she could, by making him governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands, a town which was to be the basis of operations against Spain. The Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite and Sidney's uncle, was military governor of the Netherlands, and Sidney joined. him there hoping for a brilliant campaign.

There is little more to tell. In an ill-planned and rash expedition against Zutphen, in Holland, Sir Philip, whose generosity had made him take off his cuishes and give them to an old officer whom he observed to be without them, was wounded in the thigh and carried off the field to die after a few weeks of acute suffering. His wellknown action on the battle-field need not be repeated here; it belongs to history and is repeated wherever knightly generosity and self-sacrifice need an illustrious example.

We have spoken of Sidney as the first literary critic. A writer of the same period, George Puttenham (ancestor, no doubt of the modern Putnams), wrote an elaborate work called "The Arte of English Poesie," in which he says that his aim is "to help the courtiers and the gentle-women of the court to write good poetrie, that the art may become vulgar to all Englishmen's use." We see here the old and literal meaning of "vulgar”—i.e., common to all. This explanation is interesting as showing the interest felt by the fine ladies and gentlemen of Queen Elizabeth's reign in the comparatively new art of "poetrie." They had not yet quite emerged from the feeling that writing was not an occupation for fine court people, but should be left to

See "A Short History of England," page 234.

the lower class. Neither Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," nor his "Defense of Poesie" was published during his life-time. Queen Elizabeth, whose active mind made her desire to do a little of everything, wrote some verses about the trouble Mary, Queen of Scots was giving her; and was the first to apply to that much-discussed person the felicitous phrase: "The daughter of debate."

CHAPTER XIII.

SPENSER AND LESSER WRITERS.

HE four men who rank highest among English poets of past centuries are unquestionably Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. We have already made some study of Chaucer, who died in 1400, and from whose life those of Spenser and Shakespeare are separated by an interval of more than two hundred years, while Milton comes some fifty years later.

It was a pretty conceit of the time to call Spenser "The Sunrise" as Chaucer had been called "The Day-Star" of English poetry. Edmund Spenser was born (it is supposed) in 1553, the year in which Queen Mary came to the throne. His early career, and the story of the last sad months of his life are shrouded in obscurity; but of the time in which his work was done we have details quite full considering that he wrote no letters that have been preserved, and had no Boswell. His friends have left on record many proofs of their love and admiration, but the little home-touches which would show his domestic life are wanting.

Spenser was always the man of letters and the friend of men of letters. His one point of contact with every-day life seems to be his faithful secretaryship to the military governor of Ireland. Like many poets before and since, he