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).

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.

Sidney's favorite among the Latin prosaists was unquestionably Cicero. To him, as to the men of the literary Renaissance generally, Cicero was the unrivalled model of style. Sidney's ear was charmed by the harmonious cadences of the great rhetorician, while his imagination was fired by Cicero's ostensible fervor of patriotism, his oratorical indignation or zeal, his prodigality of information and allusion, and, perhaps beyond everything else, by the reflected glories of the ancient Roman State. If the style of the master partakes somewhat too much of Asiatic grandiloquence and floridity, and somewhat too little of Attic refinement and moderation, we should not be greatly surprised if we find the pupil occasionally proving his aptness by a clever imitation of the blemishes, as well as the beauties, of his original. We must not be unjust to Sidney because the sounding brass of Cicero sometimes gave forth in his hands the tone of the clanging cymbal. It must be remembered that the mind of England had been largely nourished upon the Psalmists and Prophets of the Old Testament, and had thus acquired a certain liking for the splendor of Oriental imagery, as well as the pomp and harmonies of Oriental language. To this must be added the familiarity with the mediæval romances which came in the train of the Crusades, many of which were fragrant with the breath of the East. Finally, a fresh wave of Orientalism was now pouring upon France and England from the land of chivalrous thoughts and high emprise, the Spain of the Moors and the Castilian kings, of Guevara and Montemayor. Instead of wondering, therefore, that Sidney could endure, much less imitate, the Asianism with which Cicero's style, notwithstanding its many beauties, is still infected, we should rather wonder that he possessed the vigor of understanding and sense of form which are unmistakable in his theory and in the best of his practice, and that he was able to make so firm a stand against those tendencies of his time which resulted in the pedantries and imbecilities of Euphuism.

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Languet, Sidney's early and revered friend, is to be held partly responsible for his application to Cicero, as well as for any undue attachment to the Latin writers in general. In response to Sidney's letter quoted above, penned when Sidney was but 19, Languet wrote: "You ask me how you ought to form a style of writing. In my opinion you cannot do better than give careful study to all Cicero's letters, not only for the sake of the graceful Latin, but also on account of the weighty truths which they contain. ... But take care of slipping into the heresy of those who believe that Ciceronianism is the summum bonum, and who will spend a lifetime in aiming after it.... When you begin to read Cicero's letters you will hardly need Plutarch" (Fox Bourne, pp. 74-5). This was soon followed by more counsel of similar tenor : Greek literature, again, is a very beautiful study; but I fear you will have no leisure to follow it through, and whatever time you give to it you steal from Latin, which, though less elegant than Greek, is far better worth your knowing" (Fox Bourne, p. 76). Fortunately, as we shall see, Sidney was too wise to yield implicit obedience to his Mentor with reference to the neglect of Greek literature, and, even before writing the Defense, his eyes had been opened to the folly of excessive devotion to the niceties of Latin style. In 1580, when he had reached the age of 25, he wrote to his brother Robert: "So you can speak and write Latin not barbarously, I never require great study in Ciceronianism, the chief abuse of Oxford, qui, dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt" [who, in their application to words, neglect the things themselves]. This sounds like an anticipation of Bacon's judgment (Adv. Learning, 1. 4. 2, 3): "This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures,

than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. . . . Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter." Yet, notwithstanding Sidney's discernment of this weighty truth, and the progress in simplicity made between the writing of the Arcadia and that of the Defense, it is but too evident that what may be called the vices of Ciceronianism still continued to corrupt his style in an appreciable degree, or else that the element of purer Atticism in it had not been an effectual antidote against the Asianism derived from other sources.

In one respect the study of Cicero was an almost unmixed benefit to Sidney. More than any other author except Plutarch, Cicero seems to have acquainted him with the history of the ancient world. He was to Sidney a mine of information about all sorts of subjects - lives of men, traits of manners, and philosophies - besides supplying him with more than one epigrammatic sally which only needed to be translated into English, and deftly introduced, to adorn the page on which it appeared.

With the two chief epic poets of antiquity, Homer and Virgil, Sidney had a familiar acquaintance. Virgil occupies the first place in his affections, but he is by no means insensible to the superior loftiness and naturalness of Homer. As a highly educated man of that day, he knew well his Horace and Ovid, the dramatists Plautus and Terence, the satirists Juvenal and Persius, the historians Livy, Suetonius, Justin, and even the authors of the Augustan Histories, moralists like Seneca and the Pseudo-Cato, and perhaps Lucretius and Quintilian. Of these the first four were perhaps preferred to the others. More remarkable, because less usual at that day, was his knowledge of the Greeks. Besides Plutarch and Homer, who have already been mentioned, he admires and repeatedly mentions the Cyropædia of Xenophon. Of the three tragedians, he was apparently