well combined with the sentimental, and these again are so prettily set against the pastoral background, that, given an appetite for romance of the kind, each reader found something to stimulate his curiosity and to provide him with amusement. The defects of the Arcadia are apparent; as, for instance, its lack of humour, the extravagance of many of its situations, the whimsicality of its conceits, and the want of solid human realism in its portraits. These defects were, however, no bar to its popularity in the sixteenth century; nor would they count as such at present were it not, as Dr. Zouch pertinently remarks, that "the taste, the manners, the opinions, the language of the English nation, have undergone a very great revolution since the reign of Queen Elizabeth." Such a revolution condemns all works which fascinated a bygone age, and which are not kept alive by humour and by solid human realism, to ever-gradually-deepening oblivion. #

Before concluding this chapter there is another point of view under which the Arcadia must be considered. Sidney interspersed its prose with verses, after the model of Sannazzaro's pastoral, sometimes introducing them as occasion suggested into the mouths of his chief personages, and sometimes making them the subject of poetical disputes between the shepherds of the happy country. Some of these poems are among the best which he composed. I would cite in particular the beautiful sonnet which begins and ends with this line: "My true love hath my heart, and I have his;" and another opening with "Beauty hath force to catch the human sight." But what gives special interest to the verses scattered over the pages of Arcadia is that in a large majority of them Sidney put in practice the theories of the Areopagus. Thus we have English hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, phaleuciacs or hendecasylla

L

"Lady reserved by the heavens to do pastors' company honour,
Joining your sweet voice to the rural muse of a desert,
Here you fully do find this strange operation of love,
How to the woods love runs as well as rides to the palace;
Neither he bears reverence to a prince nor pity to beggar,

But (like a point in midst of a circle) is still of a nearness.
All to a lesson he draws, neither hills nor caves can avoid him."

One elegiac couplet will suffice:

Fortune, Nature, Love, long have contended about me,

Which should most miseries cast on a worm that I am."

Nor will it be needful to quote more than one sapphic

stanza :

"If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand,

Or mine eyes' language she do hap to judge of,
So that eyes' message be of her received,
Hope, we do live yet."

The hendecasyllables, though comparatively easy to write in English, hobble in a very painful manner, as thus:

"Reason, tell me thy mind, if here be reason,
In this strange violence to make resistance,
Where sweet graces erect the stately banner
Of virtue's regiment, shining in harness."

So do the asclepiads, which, however, are by no means so easy of execution:

"O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!

O how much I do like your solitariness!
Where man's mind hath a freed consideration

Of goodness to receive lovely direction;

Where senses do behold the order of heavenly host,
And wise thoughts do behold what the Creator is."

The anacreontics, being an iambic measure, come off somewhat better, as may be judged by this transcript from a famous fragment of Sappho :

"My Muse, what ails this ardour?
Mine eyes be dim, my limbs shake,
My voice is hoarse, my throat scorched,
My tongue to this my roof cleaves,
My fancy amazed, my thoughts dulled,
My heart doth ache, my life faints,
My soul begins to take leave."

It is obvious from these quotations that what the school called "our rude and beggarly rhyming" is not only more natural, but also more artistic than their "reformed verse." Indeed, it may be said without reserve that Sidney's experiments in classical metres have no poetical value whatsoever. They are only interesting as survivals from an epoch when the hexameter seemed to have an equal chance of survival with the decasyllabic unrhymed iambic. The same is true about many of Sidney's attempts to acclimatise Italian forms of verse. Thus we find embedded in the Arcadia terza rima and ottava rima, sestines and madrigals, a canzone in which the end of each line rhymes with a (syllable in the middle of the next. So conscientious was he in the attempt to reproduce the most difficult Italian metres that he even attempted terza rima with sdrucciolo or trisyllabic rhymes. I will select an example:—

"If sunny beams shame heavenly habitation,

If three-leaved grass seem to the sheep unsavory,
Then base and sore is Love's most high vocation.
Or if sheep's cries can help the sun's own bravery,
Then may I hope my pipe may have ability

To help her praise who decks me in her slavery."

But enough of this. It has proved a difficult task to in

troduce terza rima at all into English literature; to make so exceptionally exacting a species of it as the sdrucciolo at all attractive, would almost be beyond the powers of Mr. Swinburne. The octave, as handled by Sidney, is passable, as will appear from the even flow of this stanza :

"While thus they ran a low but levelled race,
While thus they lived (this was indeed a life!)
With nature pleased, content with present case,
Free of proud fears, brave beggary, smiting strife
Of clime-fall court, the envy-hatching place,
While those restless desires in great men rife

To visit folks so low did much disdain,

This while, though poor, they in themselves did reign."

Of the sestines I will not speak. That form has always seemed to me tedious even in the hands of the most expert Italian masters; and Sidney was not the sort of poet to add grace to its formality by any sprightliness of treatment. It should be noticed that some of the songs in the Arcadia are put into the mouth of a sad shepherd who is Sidney himself. Phillisides (for so he has chosen to Latinise the first syllables of his Christian and surnames) appears late in the romance, and prepares us to expect the higher poetry of Astrophel and Stella.

CHAPTER V.

LIFE AT COURT AGAIN, AND MARRIAGE.

WHILE Philip was in retirement at Wilton two events of interest happened. His nephew, William Herbert, saw the light upon the 28th of April; and Edmund Spenser left England for Ireland as secretary to the new Viceroy, Lord Grey of Wilton. The birth of the future Earl of Pembroke forcibly reminds us of Sidney's position in the history of English literature. This baby in the cradle was destined to be Shakespeare's friend and patron; possibly also to inspire the sonnets which a publisher inscribed in Shakespeare's name to Master W. H. We are wont to regard those enigmatical compositions as the product of Shakespeare's still uncertain manhood. But William Herbert was yet a child when his uncle Philip's life-work ended. Astrophel and Stella had circulated among its author's private friends for at least four years when Zutphen robbed England of her poet-hero. At that date little Herbert, for whom Shakespeare subsequently wrote the lines—

"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before ?"

this little Herbert was but in his seventh year.

It is also possible, but not probable, that, while Philip was away in Wiltshire, his half-affianced bride, the daugh