young heart has been influenced to brave deeds of selfdenial and self-control-by the story of Sidney at Zutphen!

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I see it before me as if on a glowing canvas. The clouds droop luridly over the blood-weltered plain, where, among the dead and dying, lies the wounded hero, scarce heeding the press of the distant battle, or the panic of the scattering foe. His eyes are dim with the deathmist; his brow grows damp with agony; the lips parch, and the faltering tongue can scarcely murmur its earnest prayer for water." And already the cooling cup is before him, and the "living lymph" sparkles with refreshing power. But see how yonder dying soldier raises his writhing limbs from the hard earth, and bends on that blessed cup the keenest, eagerest, and most wistful eyes! The hero-chief catches their glance of mute, imploring agony, and puts aside the wished-for draught. "Take it," he faintly says, "to yonder soldier; he has more need

of it than I!"

This well-known anecdote, so indicative of that selfcontrol and self-denial which are the main elements of true greatness, is the chief thing that familiarizes the name of Sir Philip Sidney to thousands of Englishmen. And yet he was a man worthy to be more fully and more widely known. Had he not died so early, I believe he would have occupied a noble niche in our English annals. His views were broad and comprehensive; his intellect had been sedulously cultivated; he had a large heart as well as a large brain;-the making, in fact, of a generous statesman as well as an accomplished knight. But he was destined to be one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" of whom the poet

HIS PARENTAGE.

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Shelley speaks of those great men whose lives have been, so to speak, incomplete and imperfect-the torsos of grand but unfinished monuments.

PHILIP SIDNEY was born at Penshurst Place, in Kent, on the 29th of November 1554. To commemorate his birth an oak was planted, which has been immortalized by rare Ben Jonson as

"That taller tree, which of a nut was set,

At his great birth, where all the Muses met;"

and celebrated by Waller, as

"Yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark
Of noble Sidney's birth."

His father was Sir Henry Sidney, a man of grave ability and singular virtue, who was knighted by Edward VI., three times employed by Queen Elizabeth as Lord-Deputy of Ireland, and afterwards appointed to the Presidency of Wales, an office which he held for six-and-twenty years. Ireland was by him partitioned into counties; he caused the Statutes to be printed, and promoted a project of national education. A man of grand and masculine character, and of warm affections, but with something of the inflexible will and austere judgment of the ancient Roman, as we find him depicted in the pages of Plutarch.*

Philip's mother—“ a full fair lady," said her husband; "in mine eye at least the fairest"—was Mary, eldest daughter of that aspiring Duke of Northumberland who closed on the scaffold at Tower Hill a stormy career of ambition and treason. She was a woman of many virtues, whom Spenser has celebrated in his "Ruins of Time,"

* Sir Henry Sidney's government of Ireland is vigorously sketched in Mr. Froude's admirable "History of England."

as the "goodly ladie," who

"Forth out of her happy womb did bring

The sacred gift of learning and all honour,

On whom the heavens poured all their gifts upon her."

Sidney was very proud of his mother's illustrious lineage. "I am a Dudley in blood," he said; "my chiefest honour is to be a Dudley."

He received his Christian name in grateful remembrance of Philip, King of Spain, whose intercession with Queen Mary had secured to Sir Henry the titles and lands forfeited by the treason of the Dudleys. The eldest, he was not the only, son of his parents. Robert and Thomas succeeded him ;* and four daughters, of whom only one grew up to womanhood, but proved indeed a perfect woman-Mary, afterwards Countess of Pembroke-no unworthy sister of the author of the "Arcadia:"- †

"Urania, sister unto Astrophel,

In whose brave mind, as in a golden coffer,

All heavenly gifts and fiches locked are,

More rich than pearls of Ind, or gold of Ophir,

And in her sex most wonderful and rare."-SPENSER.

This was the famous lady whom Ben Jonson panegyrized in one of the noblest epitaphs in the English language:

"Underneath this marble hearse
Lies the subject of all verse-
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Wise, and fair, and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

*Robert Sidney was created Earl of Leicester by James I.

† A memoir of this illustrious woman will be found in the author's "Sunshine

of Domestic Life," published by Messrs. Nelson and Sons.

(174)

A LETTER OF COUNSEL.

Marble piles let no man raise
To her name; for after days
Some kind woman born as she,
Reading this, like Niobe,

Shall turn marble, and become

Both her mourner and her tomb."

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Sir Henry having been appointed President of the Welsh Marches, took up his residence at Ludlow Castle, the ancient seat of the Princes of Wales, and despatched his youthful son to school at Shrewsbury. While studying there, he received an admirable letter of counsel from his careful father. "Let your first action," he wrote, “be the lifting up of your mind to Almighty God by hearty prayer, and feelingly digest the words you speak in prayer with continual meditation and thinking of Him to whom you pray, and of the matter for which you pray." After advising him to keep closely to his studies, to be courteous in his manners and temperate in his life, to take frequent and arduous exercise, to eschew loose and idle conversation, he concludes: "Above all things, tell no untruth, no, not even in trifles." His mother's postscript may be quoted entire:

"Your noble and careful father," she says, "hath taken pains (with his own hand) to give you, in this his letter, so wise, so learned, and most requisite precepts, for you to follow with a diligent and humble thankful mind, as I will not withdraw your eyes from beholding and reverent honouring the same, no, not sa long time as to read any letter from me; and therefore at this time I will write no other letter than this: whereby I first bless you, with my desire to God to plant in you his grace: and secondarily, warn you to have always before the eyes of your mind those excellent counsels of my lord your (174)

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dear father, and that you fail not continually once in four or five days to read them over. And for a final leavetaking for this time, see that you show yourself a loving obedient scholar to your good master, and that my lord and I may hear that you profit so in your learning as thereby you may increase our loving care of you, and deserve at his hands the continuance of his great joys, to have him often witness with his own hand the hope he hath in your well-doing.

"Farewell, my little Philip, and once again, the Lord bless you! Your loving mother,

From Shrewsbury Philip was removed, in his fifteenth year, to Christ Church, Oxford, where his ardent love of letters soon acquired him a notable reputation. His physical weakness inclined him to a life of study and reflection, so that he prematurely attained the soberness and austerity of manhood. "Though I lived with him," says his friend and biographer Lord Brooke, "and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man, with such a staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years. His talk was ever of knowledge, and his very play tended to enrich his mind." There was some fear, however, lest the keen bright sword should wear out its scabbard, for his health was often seriously affected; but his devotion to manly exercises strengthened his youthful limbs and nerved his feeble frame, rescuing him, perhaps, from the miserable fate of a premature death before he had won a claim to the remembrance of posterity.

* Dr. Zouch, "Memoirs of Sir Philip Sidney."