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[Illustration: Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Milton.]
That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty
aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar,
poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and
then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had
been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went
to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and
was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572.
Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands,
had gone as embassador to the emperor's court, and every-where won
golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of
Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the _Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia_, which remained in manuscript till 1590. This was a
pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian _Arcadia_ of
Sanazzaro, and the _Diana Enamorada_ of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.
It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney
finished only two books and a portion of the third. It describes the
adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on
the coast of Sparta.
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