PREFACE.

SIDNEY'S estimate of poetry heralded such poetic achievement as the world had only once or twice witnessed. What Sidney outlined, Spenser and Shakespeare executed, though not always in the precise forms which he himself would have approved. In this essay he appears as a link between the soundest theory of ancient times and the romantic production of the modern era, as a humanist actuated by ethical convictions, as a man of affairs discharging the function of the scholar with the imaginative insight of the poet. To assist in placing the student of English literature at the point of view from which he can rightly judge of the merits and relations of Sidney's immortal disquisition is the object of the present editor's labors.

In modernizing the spelling and punctuation of the text, I have been guided by the principles which have been well expressed by Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, in the Preface to his edition of Bacon's Essays, pp. iii-iv: "As regards spelling, the principle adopted in the following pages is this: whatever quotations or extracts are made for critical or antiquarian purposes are printed with the old spelling, but the Essays themselves are placed on the same footing as the Bible and Shakespeare; and, as being not for an age but for all ages, they are spelt with the spelling of this age.

Still less scruple has been felt in departing from the old punctuation; it has no right to be considered Bacon's; it often makes absolute nonsense of a passage; it sometimes produces ambiguities that may well cause perplexities even to intelligent readers; and its retention can only be valuable to archeologists as showing how little importance should be attached to the commas and colons scattered at random through their pages by the Elizabethan compositors."

My obligations to various scholars will be found recorded in their proper places in the Notes; but I take pleasure in bringing together, in the order of their citation, the names of Dr. J. A. H. Murray of Oxford, Mr. Ralph O. Williams of New Haven, Prof. T. F. Crane of Cornell University, Prof. Daniel G. Brinton of the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Bernadotte Perrin of Adelbert University, and Prof. Thomas D. Goodell of Yale University.

NEW HAVEN, July 4, 1890.

A. S. C.