his breast in the attitude of prayer, he ceased to breathe, without a struggle. He had lived only thirty-one years and eleven months. Perhaps no other Englishman was ever so famous at so early an age as Sidney was when he died. Byron, who naturally occurs to the memory, was certainly less widely interesting to the world at large. in 1820. Among his own contemporaries, the most illustrious, Raleigh, was an obscure though rising courtier, and unheard of outside a private circle, in his thirty-second year. But the death of Sidney, though it certainly is rather difficult to see why, was an event of universal interest. For some reason or other, he had attracted the notice and awakened the hopes of Reformed Europe. From Tunis to Cracow it was felt that if any one could stem the tide of the triumph of Philip II. it was this slim and maidenly young gentleman from Penshurst. When Sidney was only five and twenty, Antonio of Portugal thought it desirable to secure his sympathy in a letter such as a king usually writes only to a king. It was even whispered that Sidney might have been a monarch himself-that, when Henry III. fled to Paris, the crown of Poland was his for the asking. Among the familiar friends of this English youth were Rudolph II. and William of Orange, princes in politics like William of Hesse and John of Austria, princes in art like Veronese and Tintoretto. William of Orange, no every-day giver of unasked testimonials, thought, though it was a great mistake, that Elizabeth undervalued this treasure of her Court, and actually called her attention to the fact that in Philip Sidney "her Majesty had one of the ripest and greatest councillors of State at that time in Europe." There is no doubt that Palma thought the loss of Axel and Doesburg richly paid, for in the death of so dangerous and brilliant an enemy. The Governor of Flushing had proved himself no less a warrior than he was a diplomatist. The accounts of the mode in which Sidney's death was received in England seem almost fabulous. Elizabeth, who did not need the eulogies of William the Silent to teach her what her men were worth, broke out into one of the rages which passed for sorrow in this leonine woman. She had tormented Sidney with her caprices; she had let loose the bolts of her temper upon him when, with signal courage, he had solemnly reproved her; she had even spited him in the person of his family, and driven him from her Court; but she knew his value. Whether she ever liked him as she personally liked Raleigh or Essex is more than doubtful; but she was exceedingly proud of him. She spoke of him, now he was dead, as "that inconsiderate fellow," and for weeks she was dangerous to approach. Meanwhile, by slow degrees, the precious body was brought to England, the States of Holland being flatly refused the privilege of keeping it. After a week, during which I suppose that it was embalmed, it left for Flushing; after another week, it was sent to London, and from the 5th of November, 1586, to the 16th of February, 1587, it lay unburied, in a sort of pomp, in a house in the Minories. The vessel that carried it was painted black, with sails and cordage of the same colour. It was met in the Thames with military honours, as though it bore some great general or admiral killed in the wars. All this solemn prolongation of the national grief was nicely calculated to heighten the sense of national loss. The legend of Sir Philip Sidney took fabulous proportions. It was represented that Mars and Mercury had contested for the glory of his horoscope, and it was boldly hinted that he was of more than mortal generation. King James VI. summoned Minerva and Apollo, with all the Muses, to mourn one in whom all their arts had been divinely mingled. Camden, usually so sane and calm a thinker, cried out that Providence had only sent Sir Philip Sidney as a model of the virtues, and properly had snatched him back to heaven from an earth that was never worthy of him, and that now had seen him long enough to learn the lesson. Meanwhile, the slow period of public mourning, and the long-drawn funeral, gave the poets an unequalled opportunity. Oxford and Cambridge each produced a volume or garland of elegiac verse, and the sorrows of New College, Oxford, could not be confined within the conventional channel, but overflowed into a special" Peplus Sidnæi " of their own. Any confusion of metaphor which the reader may detect in this description is strictly in accordance with the species of fancy expended on the occasion. At last, on the 16th of February, 1587, when enthusiasm and anguish were risen past all bounds, there followed the funeral in St. Paul's, of which Mr. Fox Bourne from a unique pamphlet has extracted so astonishing an account. The youth dragging the 66 Semper eadem " in the dust to the soft playing of fifes; the page leading the dead poet's war-horse, with a broken lance that trailed upon the ground; the endless pomp and indescribable splendour of the pageant that followed these sad emblems; the Lord Mayor, in purple robes, walking after, at the head of the City Guilds-all this gives but a faint notion of a ceremonial the contemporary picture of which occupies thirty plates, designed to be fastened together in one long roll, in emulation, probably, of those Teutonic woodengravings of entertainments produced half a century earlier by Hans Sebald Beham and his friends. When the funeral was over, the tide of panegyric did not ebb. It flowed, on the contrary, till it rose to the extraordinary height marked by the publication of " Astrophel." And now the student of this curious mass of literature begins to notice a strange circumstance. Except in the perfectly sane and human utterances of Fulk Greville, the adoration of Sidney has, by 1588, passed altogether out It seems as though a of the category of the praises of a real man. fresh miracle of Assumption had taken place. The poets approached the tomb, but there was no body of Sidney there, only a perfume of roses. The process of beatification was complete, and the relics, which were no longer genuine relics, or human objects at all, were exposed for the veneration of all good Englishmen. As an example of this singular craze or passion, let us examine what it is that the greatest poet of the day, himself the friend of the man he celebrates, has to tell us about him. Spenser, then, describes Sidney as a poor Arcadian shepherd, brought up on the banks of Hæmony. He is a slender swain of comely shape, who seems made for merriment (Sidney being notorious for want of humour), and who is famous among the shepherds at shearing-time for piping, dancing, and sweet carolling. Many maidens wooed this swain, and so did wood-goddesses; but he fell in love with Stella, "the fair, the fairest star in sky," an astronomical deity, and scorned all these other nymphs. Wandering in a "forest wide and waste," driven thither by the desire of killing "savage beasts" in Stella's honour, a boar ran out of a thicket, and so gored him that he was like to bleed to death. But "a sort of shepherds" finding him, stanched his wounds and brought him to Stella, who had come down to earth for love of him. They fainted into one another's arms, and, as they lay there in the field, the gods transformed them "into one flower that is both red and blue." This herb is considered medicinal, and the poet recommends any one who meets with it to "pluck it softly." What could be more unreal, what could falsify history more, what could be more deplorably Byzantine in taste? It was left, however, for one Matthew Roydon to express the belief that Sidney was really the Arabian Phoenix in disguise, settled "on a cedar in this coast." Within two years Sir Philip Sidney had become a vague and splendid fable to the very men who had known and loved him. It is, therefore, I think, not inexcusable that, after about a century of worship, some reaction should have begun to express itself in relation to the mythical hero. Horace Walpole could not understand Sidney at all; the accounts which he found of his person and character struck him as revolting to common-sense, and he expressed himself on the subject with scandalous flippancy. "No man," says Walpole, "seems to me so astonishing an object of temporary admiration ; " and he goes on with dreadful justice to describe the "Arcadia" as "a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot wade through now." With one of those superficial flashes of judgment which served him like an instinct, Walpole saw that the figure of Sidney himself had been merged in that of his heroes, as though the Governor of Flushing had been a Musidorus or a Pyrocles. Walpole, having made this discovery, cared to go no further, but we, with other information at our hands, cannot leave our poet thus among the gryphons and heraldic monsters. We know that he was a human being, and therefore entirely unlike the portrait that his fanciful contemporaries left of him. Is it possible to strip off the fable, and see the actual Philip Sidney as he breathed and talked ? Much has been done in this direction by Mr. Fox Bourne in the pleasant Life of Sidney, which he published in 1862. But there is something left to do, and we anticipate with pleasure the monograph which we are promised from the genial and learned pen of Mr. J. A. Symonds. He will doubtless have much that is interesting and new to tell us about Sidney's relations with Italy and Germany, and we cannot doubt that he will be found to have searched more diligently than any previous biographer of Sidney in the correspondence of Hubert Languet. In the meantime, I would essay a few words on the character and genius of this wonderful man. Our modern estimate of him, I suppose, is mainly summed up in Shelley's words: "Sidney as he fought And as he fell, and as he lived and loved, This is very charming, but it borders not only upon the fabulous, but even upon the namby-pamby. I do not like "sublimely mild." Almost the first thing that dawns upon the student of Sidney's character is that he had a quick temper. He was far from being sublimely mild when he wrote the letter in which he told Mr. Molineux that if he ever again read one of the private letters Sidney addressed to his father, "I will thrust my dagger into you; and trust to it, for I speak in earnest." He was even less mild, he was positively injudicious, when, in the Italian inn, he accused his friend Coningsby of stealing money that was really in the pocket of mine host. The famous letter to Queen Elizabeth was sublime, but not at all mild, and we must drop this epithet, even in the peculiar sense in which Shelley may have used it, as equivalent to benignantly unperturbed. Sidney was prompt and rapid in mental movement; he formed opinions and translated them into action with great alacrity. In the very typical case of his quarrel with Lord Oxford we find him keeping his head when most men would have lost it from sheer rage; but it was all that the Queen and the Privy Council could do to prevent him from having the Earl's blood. Unquestionably he looked mild; he had a girlish face of pink and white; and Oxford, no doubt, did not know his man when he dared to bully him. Has it ever been suggested that the Sidney intended is Algernon Sidney, the republican, to whom, from Shelley's point of view, the words would be almost as applicable? But there was wiry fibre in Sidney's mind and body, and we may be sure that, in those fighting days, no mere carpet-knight would have impressed himself on the popular mind as a hero. His extraordinary ability in all the diplomatic arts is quite beyond dispute. To be a diplomatist, a man must possess sympathy, and have a rare judgment in the use of it. The ideal diplomatist, like the ideal poet, is a man in whom the masculine and feminine qualities of the intellect balance one another with absolute harmony, each supplying the wants of the other side of the character. What is related of Sidney tends to prove that he possessed this equilibrium to a very extraordinary degree, and I take it to have been the secret of his charm and of his power. Spenser tells us how the vulgar Gosson, pushing his wares into the unwilling hands of Sidney, "was for his labour scorned;" but he instantly feels that the word is incongruous as applied to Sidney, and hastens to say, "if at least it lay in the goodness of that nature to scorn." In the same sense, we may note the perspicuous patience with which he held Greville at bay, and watched the countenance of Admiral Drake during the extremely trying circumstances of his visit to Plymouth in 1585. His manner of dealing with men is clear enough from a great many fragments of evidence. He gave his full attention, very gravely, to what any individual said to him; his sympathy, which, as we have seen, was very quick, enabled him to fathom easily what was in the mind of a nervous or embarrassed applicant, and no one seems to have ever left his presence without an enthusiastic personal feeling of regard. With a temperament of this exceptional kind, and with equally exceptional opportunities and facilities, such a man as Sidney has only to see enough people to become the most beloved of men ; and the sole difficulty which we can legitimately find in the story of his popularity is to conceive how, in so few years, and without the leverage of wealth or rank, he contrived to influence so many individuals. He possessed all the personal advantages which make a primrose path of life. His delicate beauty, almost feminine in character, was in itself a passport in an age which set an extravagant value on good looks, and preferred that they should not be too massive. But this maidenly aspect, in Sidney as in Milton, belied a very vigorous and manly temper, as Pyrocles was concealed under the garb of Zelmane. Nor did Sidney ever allow himself to be browbeaten on account of the bloom of his complexion. When he was only two-and-twenty, Elizabeth sent him as ambassador to Don John of Austria, who received him with condescension, as being somewhat startled that the Queen of England should send such a boy to Philip II.'s generalissimo. But Sidney contrived to show him his mistake, and soon after we find him not knowing what tribute to pay to this "extraordinary |