INTRODUCTION
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Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, i, on the 2<footer></footer>9th of November, 1554. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, had married Mary, eldest daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and Philip was the eldest of their family of three sons and four daughters. Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh were of like age with Philip Sidney, differing only by about a year, and when Elizabeth became queen, oh of November, 1558, they were children of four or five years old.In the year 1560 Sir Henry Sidney was made Lord President of Wales, representing the Queen in Wales and the four adjat western ties, as a Lord Deputy represented her in Ireland. The official residence of the Lord President was at Ludlow Castle, to which Philip Sidney went with his family when a child of six. In the same year his father was installed as a Knight of the Garter. When in his tenth year Philip Sidney was sent from Ludlow to Shrewsbury Grammar School, where he studied for three or four years, and had among his schoolfellows Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, who remained until the end of Sidneys life one of his closest friends. When he himself was dying he directed that he should be described upon his tomb as "Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, sellor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney." Even Dr.
Thomas Thornton, of Christ Church, Oxford, under whom Sidney laced when he was eo Christ Chur his fourteenth year, at Midsummer, in 1568, had it afterwards recorded on his tomb that he was "the tutor of Sir Philip Sidney."
Sidney was in his eighteenth year in May, 1572, when he left the Uy to tinue his training for the service of the state, by travel on the ti. Lised to travel with horses for himself and three servants, Philip Sidney left London irain of the Earl of Lin, who was going out as ambassador to Charles IX., in Paris. He was in Paris oh of August in that year, which was the day of the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew. He was sheltered from the dangers of that day in the house of the English Ambassador, Sir Francis Walsingham, whose daughter Fanny Sidney married twelve years afterwards.
From Paris Sidravelled on by way of Heidelberg to Frankfort, where he lodged at a printers, and found a warm friend in Hubert La, whose letters to him have been published. Sidney was eighteen and La fifty-five, a French Huguenot, learned and zealous for the Protestant cause, who had been Professor of Civil Law in Padua, and who was ag as secret minister for the Elector of Saxony when he first knew Sidney, and saw in him a future statesman whose character and genius would give him weight in the sels of England, and make him a main hope of the Protestant cause in Europe. Sidravelled on with Hubert La from Frankfort to Vienna, visited Hungary, then passed to Italy, making fht weeks Venice his head-quarters, and then giving six weeks to Padua. He returhrough Germany to England, and was in attenda the Court of Queen Elizabeth in July, 1575. 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 ag of plays by servants of Sidneys uhe Earl of Leicester, who had obtained a patent for them, obliged the actors to cease from hiring rooms or inn yards iy, and build themselves a house of their own a little way outside one of the City gates, and wholly outside the Lord Mayors jurisdi. 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 gratulation to Rudolph II. upon his being Emperor of Germany, but uhe duties of the formal embassy was the charge of watg for opportunities of helping forward a Protestant League among the princes of Germany. On his way home through the herlands he was to vey Queen Elizabeths gratulations to William e 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 sellors of State in Philip Sidhat then lived in Europe; to the trial of which he leased to leave his ow engaged until her Majesty leased to employ this gentlemaher amongst her friends or enemies."
Sidney returned from his embassy in June, 1577. At the time of his departure, in the preg February, his sister Mary, they years old, had bee the third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and her new home as tess of Pembroke was in the great house at Wilton, about three miles from Salisbury. She had a measure of her brenius, and was of like rain. Spenser described her as "The ge 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-knowaph:- "Underh this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidneys sister, Pembrokes mother. Death, ere thou hast slain another, Learnd, and fair, and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee."
Sidneys sister became Pembrokes 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 o<samp>.９９lib.</samp>f advice; he also was distented with what seemed to be her policy, ahdrew 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 best withe manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presehe 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 beloo a sister who prized the lightest word of his, and after his death it ublished in 1590 as "The tess of Pembrokes Arcadia."
The book reprinted in this volume was written in 1581, while sheets of the "Arcadia" were still beio Wilton. But it differs wholly in style from the "Arcadia." Sidneys "Arcadia" has literary i as the first important example of the union of pastoral with heroiance, out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fi. But the genius of its author lay, it followed designedly the fashions of the hour in verse and prose, which teo extravagance of iy. The "Defence of Poesy" has higher i as the first important piece of literary criticism in our literature. Here Sidney was in ear. His style is wholly free from the euphuistic extravagan which readers of his time delighted: it is clear, direct, and manly; not the less, but the more, thoughtful and refined for its ued simplicity. As criticism it is of the true sort; not captious or formal, still less engaged, as nearly all bad criticism is, more or less, with i suggestion of the critic himself as the one owl in a world of mice. Philip Sidneys care is towards the end of good literature. He looks fhest aims, and finds them in true work, and hears Gods angel in the poets song.
The writing of this piece robably suggested to him by the fact that an ear young student, Stephen Gosson, who came from his uy about the time when the first theatres were built, and wrote plays, was turned by the bias of his mind into agreement with the Puritan attacks made by the pulpit oage (arising chiefly from the fact that plays were then acted on Sundays), and in 1579 transferred his pen from service of the players to atta them, in a piece which he called "The School of Abuse, taining a Pleasant Iive against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a oh; setting up the Flag of Defiao their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, Natural Reason, and on Experience: a Discourse as pleasant fentlemen that favour Learning as profitable for all that will follow Virtue." This Discosson dedicated "To the right noble Gentleman, Master Philip Sidney, Esquire." Sidney himself wrote verse, he was panion with the p<mark></mark>oets, and ted Edmund Spenser among his friends. Gossons pamphlet was only one expression of the narrow form of Puritan opinion that had been misled into attacks ory and music as feeders of idle appetite that withdrew men from the life of duty. To show the falla such opinion, Philip Sidney wrote in 1581 this piece, which was first printed in 1595, nine years after his death, as a separate publicatioled "An Apologie for Poetrie." Three years afterwards it was added, with other pieces, to the third edition of his "Arcadia," and theled "The Defence of Poesie." In sixteen subsequeions it tio appear as "The Defence of Poesie."
The same title was used in the separate editions of 1752 and 1810.
Professor Edward Arber re-issued in 1869 the text of the first edition of 1595, aored the inal title, which probably was that given to the piece by its author. One name is as good as the other, but as the word "apology" has somewhat ged its sense in current English, it may be well to go on call<tt>.99lib.t>ing the work "The Defence of Poesie."
In 1583 Sidney was knighted, and soon afterwards in the same year he married Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. Sos written by him acc to old fashion, and addressed to a lady in accordah a form of courtesy that in the same old fashion had always beeo exclude personal suit--personal suit rivate, and no<q></q>t public--have led to grave misapprehension among some critics. They supposed that he desired marriage with Penelope Devereux, who was forced by her family in 1580--theeen years old--into a hateful marriage with Lord Rich.
It may be enough to say that if Philip Sidney had desired her for his wife, he had only to ask for her and have her. Her father, when dying, had desired-- as any father might--that his daughter might bee the wife of Philip Sidney. But this is not the place for a discussion of Astrophel and Stella sos.
In 1585 Sidney lanning to join Drake it sea in atta Spain in the West Indies. He was stayed by the Queen. But when Elizabeth declared war on behalf of the Reformed Faith, a Leicester with an expedition to the herlands, Sir Philip Sidney went out, in November, 1585, as Governor of Flushing. His wife joined him there. He fretted at ina, and made the value of his sels so distinct that his uncle Leicester said after his death that he began by "despising his youth for a sellor, not without bearing a hand over him as a forward young man.
Notwithstanding, in a short time he saw the sun so risen above his horizon that both he and all his stars were glad to fetch light from him." In May, 1586, Sir Philip Sidney received news of the death of his father. In August his mother died. Iember he joined in the iment of Zutphen. On the 22nd of September his thigh-bone was shattered by a musket ball from the trenches. His horse toht and galloped back, but the wounded mao his seat. He was then carried to his uncle, asked for water, and when it was given, saw a dying soldier carried past, who eyed it greedily. At once he gave the water to the soldier, saying, "Thy y is yet greater than mine." Sidney lived on, patient in suffering, until the 17th of October. When he eechless before death, one who stood by asked Philip Sidney for a sign of his tirust in God. He folded his hands as in prayer over his breast, and so they were bee fixed and chill, whechers placed them by his side; and in a few mihe stainless representative of the young manhood of Elizabethan England passed away.
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