SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.* THE miniature by Isaac Oliver, from the

Royal Library of Windsor, which is engraved as the frontispiece of this little volume, presents to us a singularly gentle and reflective face and well-turned limbs, with the hands quietly grasping a sword, which seems rather for ornament than use. A dress complete and careful, and a pose rather of the "being taken kind, which, then as now, must have been a temptation and a

• A Cabinet of GEMS. Cut and Polished by Sir Philip Sidney : now, for the more radiance, presented without their Setting by George Malronald. London: =lot Stock. 1Sal. danger to sitters, make up a whole which we like to look upcn for a time, before turning over the pages of verse and prose meditation which Mr. MacDonald has culled from Sir Philip Sidney's work. We do not wonder when Mr. MacDonald speaks of him as having been the centre of more personal affection and admiration than any man of his years (for he died at two-and-thirty). We do not wonder at the praises of his contemporaries, Matthew Raydon and Lord Brooke, which the editor attaches in an appendix,—how the first sings that— "A. thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely, cheerful line ; To heare him speake and sweetly smile, You were in Paradise the while ; " while the second records that his "talk was ever of know- ledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind," and that

whatever he undertook, "the whole managing of the business, not by usurpation of violence, but—as it were—by right and acknowledgment, fell into his hands as into a natural center." There is no more striking type of character than the gently masterful ; while that Sir Philip's "end was not writing, even while he wrote," is another characteristic which picturesquely recommends him, and in a definite way. Mr. MacDonald, by- the-bye, makes a curious mistake in ascribing in his preface Lord Brooke's eulogies to Sir Fulke Greville, who appears, on the contrary, to have been Sidney's one detractor. "No man seems to me," he wrote, "so astonishing an object of temporary admiration as the celebrated friend of the Lord Brooke, the famous Sir Philip Sidney." That he "understood little of hia own language," and "died with the rashness of a volunteer,

after having lived to write with the sang-froid of Mademoiselle Scuderi," and was but one brave man in an age of heroes, in

Fulke's commentary on this " Marcellus of the English nation," who otherwise was the pet of his own and of ensuing ages.

As Mr. MacDonald's book presupposes acquaintance with the facts of Sir Philip's life, it may be as well to remind our readers and ourselves that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley, daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and was born in 1554, it is supposed at Penshurst, in Kent.

After studying at Christ Church, Oxford, he was sent to travel, and was in Paris during the massacre of the Huguenots.

After visiting Germany and Vienna, Hungary and Italy, he returned to England. His first public mission was to Germany, to condole on the death of Maximilian ; and though a favourite at Court he opposed the Queen's in- tended marriage with the Duke of Anjou, at the desire, it

is said, of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. A "high quarrel" in the tennis-court between Sidney and Lord Oxford brought about his retirement from Court for a time, during which

he wrote Arcadia. Knighted in 1582, he was made General of the Horse and Governor of Flushing, then delivered to the Queen as a cautionary town. He surprised Axil, preserved the safety and honour of the army at Gravelin, and would have been elected to that strange historic dig- nity, the Kingdom of Poland, but that the Queen would not hear of it, for fear of losing "the jewel of his time.' In 1586, however, Sidney was wounded at Zutphen, and carried to Arnheim, where, after three weeks, he died. The body was brought to England and buried at St. Paul's, and many poems were written on his death, King James the Scot heading the list with an epitaph of his own. He married the heiress of Sir Francis Walsingham, and left one daughter.

But his chief fame was to come from his Arcadia, and other writings, published some time after his death. The first was written for the use of his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and published, it would seem, in spite of his own desire for its suppression. Lady Pembroke, on her side, distinguished her- self by some verse translations from the Psalms of David, of which Mr. MacDonald has appended one or two. They do not convey to us the idea that poetry was a family gift, though written in a good simple style, natural to the time :—

"Sing, and let the song be new,

Unto him that never endeth ; Sing all earth, and all in you, Sing to God, and blesse his name.

Of the help, the health he sendeth Day by day new ditties frame."

That is well enough, but only one of the many fruitless efforts to add poetry to the finest poetry of the world.

As for Sir Philip Sidney's own graceful verse, we are glad to

welcome it again, with the clear Elizabethan ring which brings before us at one the picture of the Shakespeare lyric :—

" Come, sleep, oh sleep, the certain knot of peace,

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The por man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 'Tis indifferent judge between the high and low ; With shield of proof shield me from out the pre,aae Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; Oh, make in me those civil wars to cease ; I will good tribute pay if thou do so.

Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,

A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light, A rosy garland, and a weary head ;

And if these things, as being thine by right, Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see."

Except for the curious falling-off of the last couplet, with the ungraceful use of" heavy" and the inevitable Stella's sudden

and inappropriate entrance, this sonnet has a charm not easy to surpass, especially in the antithesis of the tenth line. Delight-

ful after the old fashion, too—as Stella has to be accepted—

is the sonnet which attributes all the rhymer's successes in horsemanship or strength or sleight of arm to the beams which shot from Stella's eyes, and accomplished the whole thing. The traditional "beam in the eye" acquires quite new force from this ; and it is with fresh pleasure in this same sonnet that we make acquaintance anew with the famous and familiar phrase about the "sweet enemy, France." At times, as we turn the pages over, Sir Philip becomes to us almost as "full of quotations" as the Prince of Denmark himself :—

"Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread, For Love is dead ! "

There runs a tune of quite another swing, founded seemingly

upon some evanescent whim of the same fair lady of the lyre, and ending in the confession that "rage bath this error bred." He had called his Stella's wit a " franzy " in the first stanza,

and cannot repent enough in the last. 0 quaint and fanciful Elizabethan age, how wide and deep is the gulf which seems to separate you from the Victorian, and how welcome it is to cross it for a time in the company of spirits such as that !

All this perpetual wooing and fighting produced a mould so unlike Nature's other casts, that it is like the study of a picture-gallery. He was eminently a British "worthy," this young rhymer and swordsman Marcellus. And he had his sympathies all round :—

" If I saw my good dog grieved, And a help for him did know, My love should not be believed, But he were by me relieved."

The book before us is more difficult of comment when we come to the prose. "Extracts from extracts" are a very hard matter to make, especially to a writer who must admit his want of sufficient familiarity with Arcadia as a whole. We can, at this period of the year in the valleys, express our entire agreement with the following rhymed sentiment :—

" We oft are angrier with the feeble fly, For business where it pertains him not,

Than with the poisonous toads that quiet lie;"

but find it difficult to fill out a context for this :—" Like a man whose beat building was a well-framed conscience even with the grave behaviour of a wise father, whom nothing but love makes to chide, he thus said unto them." This passage, which stands alone just as we extract it, is an instance of many that should have been set down more fully or not set down at all, in order fairly to sample the many-sided mind whose thoughts make up the book. How wide a field Sir Philip Sidney took for his own, may be gathered from a table of contents which includes such subjects as "Men and Women," "Love and Marriage," "Religion," "Philosophy," "Human Nature," "Politics and Policy," "Nature and Art," and from them strays to "Horses," "Armour," "Attire," and " Combat ; " while fifteen pages are devoted to considerations and medita- tions on "Poetry." Surely here is a sufficient summary of life to leave little unsaid. We have, however, even at the present season, failed to find anything very memorable or appropriate in the political meditations to which we naturally turned at first, to see if they contained any suggestions towards the solution of Home-rule. The maxim that "rumours do violently blow the sails of popular judgments, and few there be that can discern between truth and truth- likeness, between shows and substance," adds but little to our store except the delightful word " truthlikeness," which we

are not aware of having met with before in its Saxon

equivalent for "verisimilitude." As becomes a poet, Sir Philip is much happier upon poetry, which was his well- beloved mistress after all, even more than the horses and armour, on which he has many pleasant and noteworthy things to say. The philosophers receive small quarter in comparison to the bards. "For indeed," writes the aphorist, "after the philosophers had picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry the right discerning true points of knowledge, they forth- with, putting it in method, and making a school-art of that which the poets did only teach by a divine delightfulness, beginning to spurn at their guides, like ungrateful prentices, were not content to set up shop for themselves, but sought by all means to discredit their masters." The italics are our own, and introduced in the first case to mark an expression of peculiar charm ; in the second, to note what is to us a novelty as an expression of Elizabethan date. To "set up shop" sounds like an ultra-modernism, whereas, "The poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs ; the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher," has the veritable note of one of Shake- speare's moralists. It is the "power of moving" which Sir Philip claims as the poet's special aptitude,—who, "forsooth, cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner; and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue." No man upon that point, he says, is so much

oatopi-i.6606; as to compare the philosopher in moving power with the poet. And he carries out his theme by favourably comparing the "feigned Cyrus" and the "feigned 2Eneas "of

Xenophon and Virgil, to the true Cyrus and 2Eneas of the historians, even as he commends a painter for a flattering portrait. So, too, does he discourse most winningly of what we call poetical justice :—

" If evil men come to the stage, they ever go out (as the tragedy writer answered to one that misliked the shew of such persons) so manacled as they little animate folks to follow them. But the history, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness. For see we not valiant lliiltiades rot in his fetters ? the just Phocion and the accomplished Socrates put to death like traitors ? the cruel Severus live prosperously ? Sylla and Marius dying in their beds ? Pompey and Cicero slain when they would have thought exile a happiness P See we not virtuous Cato driven to kill himself, and rebel Qmsar so advanced, that his name yet, after a thousand six hundred years, lasteth in the highest honour ?"

The judgment of Cessar is a strange one from a soldier like

Sir Philip; but throughout these aphorisms his deep love of poetry is very pleasant to trace. For him, the poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth ; " and as for the man who cannot love poetry, the final extract is addressed to him as a fair parallel to Shakespeare's condemnation of the "man who hath not music in his soul :"—

"But if (fie of such a but !) you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry ; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the skies of poetry, or rather by a certain rustical disdain will become such a name as to be a Momus of Poetry; then, though I will not wish unto you the ass's ears of

Midas nor to be rimed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland ; yet thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live you live in love and never get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph."

On the quieter philosophies of life he sermonises his brother in a discourse which is worth a study upon the age quod agis. He bids him keep and increase his music for melancholy

times, and so exercise horsemanship as to contemplate it as an art ; learn a better hand, owning his own as naught; and finally, to have a care of his diet, and consequently his com- plexion ; and "when you play at weapons, I would have you get thick caps and brasers." And if we trust the little book before us, his simple life was simply closed when his last words were these : "I would not change my joy for the empire of the world !"