A Defence of Poesie and Poems | Page 4

then giving six weeks to Padua. He returned
through Germany to England, and was in attendance it the Court of
Queen Elizabeth in July, 1575. Next month his father was sent to
Ireland as Lord Deputy, and Sidney lived in London with his mother.
At this time the opposition of the Mayor and Corporation of the City of
London to the acting of plays by servants of Sidney's uncle, the Earl of
Leicester, who had obtained a patent for them, obliged the actors to
cease from hiring rooms or inn yards in the City, and build themselves
a house of their own a little way outside one of the City gates, and
wholly outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction. Thus the first theatre
came to be built in England in the year 1576. Shakespeare was then but
twelve years old, and it was ten years later that he came to London.
In February, 1577, Philip Sidney, not yet twenty-three years old, was
sent on a formal embassy of congratulation to Rudolph II. upon his
becoming Emperor of Germany, but under the duties of the formal
embassy was the charge of watching for opportunities of helping
forward a Protestant League among the princes of Germany. On his
way home through the Netherlands he was to convey Queen Elizabeth's
congratulations to William of Orange on the birth of his first child, and
what impression he made upon that leader of men is shown by a

message William sent afterwards through Fulke Greville to Queen
Elizabeth. He said "that if he could judge, her Majesty had one of the
ripest and greatest counsellors of State in Philip Sidney that then lived
in Europe; to the trial of which he was pleased to leave his own credit
engaged until her Majesty was pleased to employ this gentleman, either
amongst her friends or enemies."
Sidney returned from his embassy in June, 1577. At the time of his
departure, in the preceding February, his sister Mary, then twenty years
old, had become the third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
and her new home as Countess of Pembroke was in the great house at
Wilton, about three miles from Salisbury. She had a measure of her
brother's genius, and was of like noble strain. Spenser described her as
"The gentlest shepherdess that lives this day,
And most resembling,
both in shape and spright,
Her brother dear."
Ben Jonson, long after her brother had passed from earth, wrote upon
her death the well-known epitaph:-
"Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's
sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another,

Learn'd, and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."
Sidney's sister became Pembroke's mother in 1580, while her brother
Philip was staying with her at Wilton. He had early in the year written a
long argument to the Queen against the project of her marriage with the
Duke of Anjou, which she then found it politic to seem to favour. She
liked Sidney well, but resented, or appeared to resent, his intrusion of
advice; he also was discontented with what seemed to be her policy,
and he withdrew from Court for a time. That time of seclusion, after the
end of March, 1580, he spent with his sister at Wilton. They versified
psalms together; and he began to write for her amusement when she
had her baby first upon her hands, his romance of "Arcadia." It was
never finished. Much was written at Wilton in the summer of 1580, the
rest in 1581, written, as he said in a letter to her, "only for you, only to
you . . . for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, triflingly handled.

Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets
of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as
fast as they were done." He never meant that it should be published;
indeed, when dying he asked that it should be destroyed; but it
belonged to a sister who prized the lightest word of his, and after his
death it was published in 1590 as "The Countess of Pembroke's
Arcadia."
The book reprinted in this volume was written in 1581, while sheets of
the "Arcadia" were still being sent to Wilton. But it differs wholly in
style from the "Arcadia." Sidney's "Arcadia" has literary interest as the
first important example of the union of pastoral with heroic romance,
out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fiction. But
the genius of its author was at play, it followed designedly the fashions
of the hour in verse and prose, which tended to extravagance of
ingenuity. The "Defence of Poesy" has higher interest as the first
important piece of literary criticism in our