SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586), schol

ar, poet, politician, and soldier, was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and, through his mother, the grandson of the Duke of Northumberland. After attending Shrewsbury School and the University of Oxford, he travelled for three years in France, Germany, and Italy. After his return home he soon won the favour of Queen Elizabeth, who sent him on several diplomatic missions. During a retirement from court-life, staying with his sister, Lady Pembroke, at Wilton (1580), he wrote most of his pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (publ. in 1590), in which he followed Italian and Spanish models, as the Arcadia of Sannazaro and the Diana of Montemayor. To

about the same time may be assigned the best-known of his works, the fine critical essay entitled The Defence of Poesy or An Apology for Poetry (publ. in 1595), which vigorously vindicated poetry against the Puritanical invectives of Gosson's School of Abuse (1579). In remembrance of an early attachment to Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex, then to become Lady Rich, he composed, partly in the conventional style of Petrarch and his English imitators, a series of lovesongs and sonnets entitled Astrophel and Stella (publ. in 1591). None of his works were printed till after his death. He died at the early age of 32, from a wound received in the battle of Zutphen (1586).

From THE DEFENCE OF POESY.
[Ab. 1581]

The philosopher showeth you the way, he informeth you of the particularities, as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many byturnings that may divert you from your way. But this is to no man but to him that will read him, and 10 read him with attentive, studious painfulness. Which constant desire whosoever hath in him, hath already passed half the hardness of the way, and therefore is beholding to the philo15 sopher but for the other half. Nay, truly, learned men have learnedly thought that where once reason hath so much over-mastered passion, as

Herrig-Förster, British Authors.

that the mind hath a free desire to
do well, the inward light each mind 20
hath in itself is as good as a philo-
sopher's book; since in nature we
know it is well to do well, and what
is well and what is evil, although
not in the words of art which philo- 25
sophers bestow upon us; for out of
natural conceit the philosophers drew
it. But to be moved to do that which
we know, or to be moved with desire
to know, Hoc opus, hic labor est. 30

Now, therein, of all sciences (I speak still of human and according to the human conceit) is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a pro- 35 spect into the way, as will entice

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