lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph." Perfect in temper, high in aim, Sidney's "Apologie for Poetry" was the first piece of formal criticism in our literature written by a man of genius. The principles of taste that Sidney had derived chiefly from study of the best writers of ancient Greece and Rome, with some aid from the Italians of the Renaissance, he applied here to the writing of pure English prose free from the faults in fashion. From the Italian critics he had learnt to enforce out of Aristotle maintenance by playwrights of the unities of time and place. There was nothing in 1581 to show how the English drama, through a greater freedom, would acquire a greater strength. It is evident also that Sidney was better read in Greek, Latin, and Italian than in English poets; for of Chaucer he names only "Troilus and Cressida," and he can think of no other works of mark in English poetry worth naming than "The Mirror for Magistrates," the lyrics of the Earl of Surrey, and the Eclogues of the "Shepheardes Calender." "Besides these," he says, "I do not remember to have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical sinews in them." Sidney-at Court again, after the months of retirement at Wilton, during which he wrote "Arcadia "—was knighted by Elizabeth in January, 1583, when his age was about twenty eight. In the following March or April he was married to Frances, eldest daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and the next year was spent in married peace. That bold searcher for spiritual truth, Giordano Bruno, came, in July, 1583, to England, where he remained two years, and was among the friends of Philip Sidney. In 1584 and 1585 Bruno expressed his honour for Sidney by dedicating to him two works; one set forth his philosophy in an allegory, the other was on the heroic enthusiasm that forces men to strive towards the ideal of true beauty. Astrophel and Stella. Sidney wrote sonnets in those days-" Passions" of the old conventional type-meaning, as usual, to address them to some lady who deserved compliment, and of whom his conventional rhapsodies could not very well be taken seriously. As the Earl of Surrey addressed his love exercises to a child for whom the Court felt sympathy, Sidney paid the like compliment to an unhappy wife. Penelope Devereux, daughter to his old friend the late Earl of Essex, had once been talked of as his own possible wife. Her father said that he would have been proud of Philip Sidney for a son-in-law. And if so, why had the match not taken place? A letter from Edward Waterhouse to Sir Henry Sidney, dated at Chartley after the funeral of Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, Penelope's father, speaks of "treaty between Master Philip and my Lady Penelope " as so much desired of many that "I must say to your Lordship, as I have said to my Lord of Leicester and Master Philip, the breaking off from this match, if the default be on your parts, will turn to more dishonour than can be repaired with any other marriage in England." If Sidney had been really devoted to the lady, he could have married her. He says as much in a sonnet beginning "I might—unhappy word, O me !—I might, And then would not, or could not, see my bliss." He did not marry her because he did not wish to do so, and in his own day no reasonable being ever supposed that he paid suit to her except in the way of verse, though he did make his poetical love-passion direct in its address, and would not have it turned to allegory. Yet the sonnets of this series-usually accurate in their structure and Petrarchan, except for the rhyming couplet at the close-speak Sidney's mind as a poet by suggestion that runs through the series identifying Stella with Virtue : : "True that True Beauty Virtue is indeed, True; and yet true-that I must Stella love." This also is a sonnet of Sidney's, true in spirit, though less regular than usual in the structure of its rhymes— "Leave me, O Love which reachest but to dust, And thou, my Mind, aspire to higher things; Who seeketh heaven and comes of heavenly breath. Penelope, when about nineteen, was married by her guardian, against her will, to Lord Robert Rich, heir to the ill-gotten wealth of Lord Chancellor Rich. That chancellor, the grandson of two thriving London mercers, had risen by his want of principle, and had secured to himself great bargains at the suppression of the monasteries. He grasped wealth enough to endow two earldoms acquired by his descendants. The chancellor died in 1568, and his son Robert, second Baron Rich, died in 1581, leaving his son and heir, another Lord Robert, the rich man to whom Penelope was sold. She protested even at the altar. The contractor for her is described as "of an uncourtly disposition, unsociable, austere, and of no very agreeable conversation to her." The unhappiness of her forced marriage made Lady Rich at this time an object of considerate attention. Philip Sidney was an old friend of her father's, and he gave her the place of honour in his sonnet-writing, wherein she was to be Stella ("the Star"), he Astrophel ("the Lover of the Star"); and certainly, as all the Court knew, and as the forms of such ingenious love-poetry implied, so far as love in the material sense was concerned, with as much distance between them as if she had shone upon him from above the clouds. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella sonnets were being written at the time when he was about to marry Fanny Walsingham; and in those earnest Elizabethan days, at the fitfully strict Court of Elizabeth, since the character of such poetical love-passions was then understood, they brought upon Sidney's credit not a breath of censure. As for Lady Rich, she gave herself to Sir Christopher Blount, who became Lord Mountjoy in 1600 and Earl of Devonshire in 1604. After divorce from her husband she married Blount in December, 1605, having been already the mother of five children by him, added to seven by Lord Rich. But that was a real passion, and what each felt in it was not told for the amusement of the public. Sidney's sonnets were not misread by his contemporaries nor by his wife. Spenser sang of Astrophel in his own spirit. Fulke Greville wrote in after years a Life of his friend, and described him as England saw him in his own day. "Now," he wrote, "let princes vouchsafe to consider what importance it is to the honour of themselves and their estates to have one man of such eminence; not only as a nourisher of virtue in their courts or service, but besides for a reformed standard by which even the most humorous persons could not but have a reverend kind of ambition to be tried and approved current. This I do the more confidently affirm because it will be confessed by all men that this one man's example and personal respect did not only encourage learning and honour in the schools, but brought the affection and true use thereof both into the court and camp. Nay more, even many gentlemen, excellently learned amongst us, will not deny but that they affected to row and steer their course in his wake. Besides which honour of unequal nature and education, his very ways in the world did generally add reputation to his prince and country, by restoring amongst us the ancient majesty of noble and true dealing, as a manly wisdom that can no more be weighed down by any effeminate craft than Hercules could be overcome by that effeminate army of dwarfs. And this was it which, I profess, I loved dearly in him, and still shall be glad to honour in the good men of this time: I mean that his heart and tongue went both one way, and so with everyone that went with the truth, as knowing no other kindred, party, or end. Above all, he made the religion he professed the firm basis of his life." Sidney's last years. In 1584 the course of events led Sir Philip Sidney to advocate direct attack by sea upon the Spanish power. He would have Elizabeth come forward as Defender of the Faith, at the head of a great Protestant League. He was a member of the Parliament that met in November, 1584; and in July, 1585, he was joined with the Earl of Warwick in the Mastership of the Ordnance. His strongest desires caused him to look in two directions for his course of action: he might aid in direct attack on the Spanish possessions, which, as source of treasure, were a source of power; he might aid in the rescue of the Netherlands from Spain. During a great part of the year 1585 his mind was very much with Drake and Raleigh. In the spring of 1585, Raleigh sent a fleet of seven vessels to Virginia, in charge of his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, with Ralph Lane, who was to be governor of the colony they went to found. Lane was left with 105 colonists on the island of Roanoake. In the same year Sir Francis Drake was sent as admiral, with a fleet of twenty-one ships, |