INTRODUCTION.

1. SKETCH OF SIDNEY'S LIFE.

(Adapted from the Chronicle in Arber's edition.)

PHILIP SIDNEY was son of Sir Henry Sidney by the Lady Mary his wife, eldest daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland; was born, as 'tis supposed, at Penhurst in Kent, 29 November, 1554, and had his Christian name given to him by his father from King Philip, then lately married to Queen Mary" (Wood, Athena Oxonienses). He was the eldest of three sons and four daughters. Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, both of the same age (nine years), and who became friends for life, enter Shrewsbury School on the same day, Oct. 17, 1564. Fulke Greville thus testifies of his schoolfellow: "Of whose youth I will report no other wonder but thus, that though I lived with him, and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man; with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years. His talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind, so as even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn, above that which they had usually read or taught; which eminence by nature and industry made his worthy father style Sir Philip in my hearing (though I unseen) Lumen familiæ suæ" [the light of his family]. "While he was very young, he was sent to Christ Church to be improved in all sorts of learning. . . where continuing till he was about 17 years of age (Wood, Athena Oxonienses). This settlement at Oxford was made when

...

he was 13 years old. On May 25, 1572, the Queen grants Philip Sidney license to go abroad with three servants and four horses. On May 26 he leaves London in the train of the Earl of Lincoln, Ambassador to the French King. August 9, Charles IX makes him one of the Gentlemen of his Chamber. August 24, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Sidney, being in the house of the English Ambassador, Sir Francis Walsingham, is safe. He however soon leaves Paris, and journeys by Heidelberg to Frankfort, where he meets Hubert Languet, aged 54. He stays at Frankfort about nine months. They two then go to Vienna, where, after some trips to Hungary, Sidney leaves Languet, and spends eight months in Italy, chiefly in Venice, Padua, and Genoa. He returns to Vienna in November, spends his winter there, and, coming home through the Low Countries, reaches England on May 31, 1575, having been absent a trifle over three years, from the age of 17 till that of 20. In the same year introduced to Court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. July 9-27, 1575, is at the famous reception given by Leicester to the Queen, at Kenilworth. The Court moves to Chartley Castle, where Philip is supposed first to have seen 'Stella' (Penelope, daughter of Lord Essex, then aged 13; afterwards Lady Rich). The sonnets of Astrophel and Stella go on for the next five or six years. In 1577, at the age of 22, is sent as Ambassador with messages of condolence to Rodolph II, the new emperor of Germany, at Prague, and to the two sons of Frederic III, late Elector Palatine, viz., Lewis (now Elector) and John Casimir, at Heidelberg. In May of 1578, on the coming of the Court to his uncle's at Wanstead, Sidney writes a masque entitled The Lady of the May. About this time Sidney becomes acquainted with Gabriel Harvey, and through him with Edmund Spenser. In August, 1579, Stephen Gosson publishes The School of Abuse, and on Oct. 16 Spenser writes to Harvey Sidney's idea of it. Soon after (Dec. 5)

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."

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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