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II

THE HOME OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

II

THE HOME OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

"For a dearer life

Never in battle hath been offered up,

Since in like cause and in unhappy day,

By Zutphen's walls the peerless Sidney fell."

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY is the enigma of the Elizabethan age. His span of life was but a brief thirty-two years, and as the first twenty years of any man's career are but a preparation for the activities of after-life, Sidney had only twelve years in which to impress himself on English history and win his renown. But they sufficed. After the lapse of more than three centuries his fame shines as brightly in the annals of England as that of Spenser, of Raleigh, of Drake, of Shakespeare, and of other Elizabethan immortals, against whose names there are recorded achievements far surpassing anything Sidney ever accomplished.

As great deeds went in England in the closing half of the sixteenth century, Sidney did nothing

great. He made the grand tour as a recognised necessary part of a liberal education in those days; he was sent to Vienna on a small embassy of condolence; he was appointed cup-bearer to Queen Elizabeth; he addressed a surprisingly bold epistle to his sovereign in opposition to her contemplated marriage with the Duke of Anjou ; and, finally, as Earl Leicester's companion, he was named Governor of Flushing. This record, even with his literary work thrown in, offers no explanation of the persistence of Sidney's fame. He lives, really, by the heroism of his death, and that heroism was the natural flower of his rare character, and that character was moulded into its fine quality by a wise father and a tender mother in Sidney's happy boyhood days at Penshurst.

When Musidorus, escaped from shipwreck, accompanied his two shepherd friends to the house of Kalender in Arcadia, he found himself in the presence of a building made "of fair and strong stone, not cffecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honorable presenting of a firm stateliness. The lights, doors, and stairs rather directed to the use of the guest than to the eye of the artificer, and yet as the one chiefly heeded so the other not neglected; each place

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