Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar is entered at Stationer's Hall. In 1580 Sidney writes to the Queen against her marrying the Duke of Anjou, and while virtually banished from Court writes the Arcadia, and, jointly with his sister, translates the Psalms. Early in 1581 Sidney is a member of Parliament, and on Sept. 30 Languet dies at Antwerp. On Jan. 8, 1583 the Queen knights him, and soon after he marries Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. In this year he probably writes the Defense of Poesy. During the winter of 1584-5 he is a second time member of Parliament. His daughter Elizabeth, afterward Countess of Rutland, is born in 1585, and Sidney projects an expedition to America with Sir Francis Drake. On Nov. 7, 1585 he is appointed Governor of Flushing, on Nov. 16 leaves England for the last time, and on Nov. 21 assumes his office. In 1586 his father and mother both die. On Sept. 22 of this year the fight at Zutphen occurs. According to the Earl of Leicester's account, Sidney "received a sore wound upon his thigh, three fingers above his knee, the bone broken quite in pieces." Sidney lingered twentysix days, his last words being these, which were addressed to his brother: "Love my memory, cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they were honest. But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator, in me beholding the end of this world. with all her vanities." He died when he had not quite attained his thirty-second year. On Oct. 24 his body was removed to Flushing, embarked there for conveyance to London on Nov. 1, landed at Tower Hill on Nov. 5, and taken to a house in the Minories, without Aldgate, where it remained until the public funeral at St. Paul's on Feb. 16, 1587. "Volumes," says Fox Bourne (Memoir, p. 534), "would be filled were I to collect all the praise uttered in prose, and still more extensively in verse, by Sir Philip Sidney's contemporaries or his immediate successors."

2. DATE OF COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION.

As Sidney refers to the Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser (47 14), the Defense must have been written subsequent to the publication of that work, which was entered at Stationer's Hall on Dec. 5, 1579. Moreover, the Defense was in some measure intended as a reply to Gosson's School of Abuse, which appeared about August, 1579, and which had certainly been examined by Sidney before the middle of October of that year, as appears from Spenser's letter to Harvey.

After Sidney's departure from England to serve in the Low Countries, Nov. 16, 1585, he would have had no leisure for the composition of such a work. Accordingly it must have been written between 1579 and 1585. Arber thinks "that the vindication followed soon upon the attack," and is therefore disposed to fix the date of the Defense in 1581. Fox Bourne says (Memoir, p. 407): "The Defense of Poesie, written after The Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella, and therefore probably not until the year 1583." In explanation of this, it must be remembered that the Arcadia was begun, and the most of it probably written, in 1580. Fox Bourne says of it (Memoir, p. 345): "Having commenced his romance in the summer of 1580, I infer that Sidney had written about three-quarters of the whole, and all which has come down to us in a finished state, by the autumn of 1581." Some time must be allowed for the change in Sidney's style, the abandonment of a florid and sentimental manner of writing, and the acquisition of that sobriety and solidity of diction which reflects a maturer manhood. This progress toward maturity is noted by Fox Bourne (p. 347): "His journey to Flanders, in the early spring of 1582, must have interrupted his literary work. After that there was a marked change in his temper. Honest purposes were rising in him which little accorded with many sentiments in the half

written romance."

The argument derived from the change in Sidney's style, the index of a corresponding change in his temper and views, seems to me irresistible, and I am therefore inclined to place the Defense as late as 1583. The quiet happiness of the first months succeeding his marriage may have been especially favorable to such thoughtful composition.

Even more conducive to the philosophical meditation which the authorship of this tractate required may have been his friendship with a famous philosopher and highly gifted nature, who in that year came to England and entered the circle composed of Sidney and his most intimate friends. I refer to the poet and mystic, Giordano Bruno, a precursor of Bacon and martyr of the Inquisition. The preparation for the Defense necessitated a comparison of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle touching poetry, and nothing could well have served as a more urgent stimulus to such philosophical study than familiar intercourse with Bruno, at home in Platonism and Neoplatonism, and a vigorous assailant of the exclusive authority of Aristotle. Who can fail to recognize the substantial identity of Sidney's reflection on the loveliness of virtue (30 20-22), not only with the common source in Plato, but also with the following sentiment taken from Bruno's Heroic Rapture, which was dedicated to Sidney (quoted in Frith's Life of Giordano Bruno, p. 125): "For I am assured that Nature has endowed me with an inward sense by which I reason from the beauty before my eyes to the light and eminence of more excellent spiritual beauty, which is light, majesty, and divinity." The impulse given by Bruno would be precisely that which Sidney needed in order to urge him to clarify his ideas, and reduce them to the orderly form in which they are presented in the Defense. On the hypothesis that this intimacy with Bruno did mark a distinct stage in Sidney's spiritual development, we can more readily comprehend how he was led to undertake the

translation of Duplessis Mornay's book on the Truth of the Christian Religion, a work abounding in the Neoplatonic views with which Bruno's philosophy is surcharged.

The reason for assigning the Defense to the year 1581 has less weight when we discover that it is much more than a reply to Gosson, that the "argument of abuse" occupies a comparatively small part of the whole treatise, and that the positive, constructive, and critical element of it is what constitutes its chief value. Were we to assume, with Grosart (see p. xxxviii), that Spenser, perhaps before Gosson's attack was issued, suggested such a positive and constructive work to Sidney, if he did not actually have a hand in the planning of Sidney's own tract, there would be still less ground for believing that Sidney hastened to reply, especially as there had been at least one confutation of Gosson's pamphlet attempted in the year 1579, under the title of Honest Excuses. In Gosson's Apology of the School of Abuse (Arber's ed., p. 73), we read: "It is told me that they have got one in London to write certain Honest Excuses, so they term it, to their dishonest abuses which I revealed." This Apology was written in 1579, and within a year or so Thomas Lodge had written his Defense, unless we assume that this is identical with the Honest Excuses, as has been done by some. In any event, we may be sure that there was no lack of ephemeral strictures, conceived in the same kind as the School of Abuse itself. What was wanted was a dignified discussion of the whole subject, based upon a profound and dispassionate view of the principles involved, and this, so different in every way from a hasty compilation, spiced with virulent epigrams, or what passed for such, Sidney would have been in no haste to publish. To these considerations in favor of the later date may be added the opinion of Collier (Hist. Eng. Dram. Poetry, 2. 422-3 and 3. 374), who believes it to have been written "about the year 1583."

The Defense was not published till 1595, and then by two different printers, Olney and Ponsonby. The former gave it the title, An Apologie for Poetrie; the latter, The Defence of Poesie. It is doubtful which of these appeared the earlier (Flügel's ed., pp. 65, 66). Sidney himself refers to the treatise as "a pitiful defense of poor poetry" (but cf. p. xxxix).

3. LEARNING.

Like Bacon and Shakespeare, Sidney was a diligent student of Plutarch, and scarcely less of the Morals than of the Lives. On the 19th of December, 1573, he wrote from Venice to his friend Languet, asking for a copy of Plutarch in French. The indications accordingly are that he did not then read Greek with much fluency. His words are (Fox Bourne, Memoir, p. 74): "If you can pick them up in Vienna, I wish you would send me Plutarch's works translated into French. I would willingly pay five times their value for them." Languet replied "that for all the money in the world he could not buy a copy of Plutarch, though perhaps he might borrow one" (Fox Bourne, p. 75). This answer is not a little surprising, seeing that Amyot's French translation of the Lives, from which the English rendering by North was afterward made, appeared in 1559, that of the Morals not being published, however, till 1574. North's version was issued in 1579, but long before this time Sidney was no doubt able to read Greek with much greater ease, and in any case must have familiarized himself with the matter of Plutarch. No one among the ancients was so abundant a source of illustration to the moralists and essayists of the sixteenth century. It is for his store of anecdote and his living traits of the great men of antiquity that Sidney chiefly uses him, though it is clear that he had likewise become strongly imbued with Plutarch's ethical sentiments, except in so far as they were condemned or superseded by the purer tenets of Christianity.