Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, 'Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.' And when he had pledged this poor soldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim." Here he died three weeks later with words of Christian hope upon his lips. At his death, says his chaplain who watched by his side, he lifted up his eyes and hands uttering these words, "I would not change my joy for the empire of the world." So passed, at the age of thirty-two, a true knight, "who trod," as an old writer says, "from his cradle to his grave amid incense and flowers and died in a dream of glory." The pattern gentleman of England, is not that a goodly fame? I think it cannot be that any of the several portraits we have gives us the charm of his face. His best portrait was that drawn by an obscure anonymous writer just after his death, in the oft-quoted lines: A sweet attractive kinde of grace, The lineaments of Gospell bookes. One would like to know more of Philip Sidney's sister, Mary. Like her mother, Mary Sidney was never ambitious to shine in courts or to meddle with the affairs of state, and the records of the historian, therefore, but seldom mention her. But no woman of her age has a more enviable fame than she. About the time that Philip Sidney came home from his travels on the Continent, his sister Mary married the Earl of Pembroke, a grave and quiet man much older than herself. For forty years thereafter, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was perhaps the one woman in England best worth knowing. In those days learning was thought to befit a woman as well as a man, and Mary Sidney was mistress not only of the French, Italian, and Latin languages, but of the Greek and Hebrew as well. She was a graceful writer of verse; and her house at Wilton-beautiful still in its quiet seclusion just within sight of the graceful cathedral spire of Salisbury—and her town-house in Aldersgate Street were the homes of learning and of poetry. Her society was sought by the greatest and the wisest of her day. Her brother Philip wrote for her amusement the Arcadia,-The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is its name, you remember. Edmund Spenser sang her praise in one of his best minor poems. A host of lesser lyric singers fluttered about her. She was, it is safe to say, the patron and friend of Shakespeare himself, and we know that her son, William Herbert,-after his father's death third Earl of Pembroke, in later days Chancellor of Oxford, founder of Pembroke College, the man who was, says Clarendon, the most universally beloved and esteemed of any in that age, we know, I say, that this young William Herbert, Mary Sidney's son and Philip Sidney's nephew, was a generous and intelligent friend of Shakespeare. It was to him that the first folio edition of Shakespeare was dedicated, and if we could ever unriddle that world's enigma, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, I think it probable that we should find the "Mr. W. H." to whom they are dedicated to be none other than young William Herbert, Mary Sidney's son. It was to Mary Sidney, too, that Shakespeare's great compeer, Ben Jonson, dedicated some of his best work, with words of such wise and manly esteem as do credit alike to him and to her. She outlived her husband many years, retaining to the last the increasing honor and affection of all in England whose regard was worth most, and when she died it was Ben Jonson who wrote for her the beautiful and famous epitaph: 1 Underneath this sable hearse Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; Time shall throw a dart at thee. 'Or perhaps William Browne. See note F. E. Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics, pp. 294-5. [L. B. G.] There was another noble family whose relations with the Sidneys every one familiar with the story will recollect. In those relations lay the romance and the pathos of Philip Sidney's life. When Philip Sidney's father, Henry Sidney, went to take possession of this castle of Ludlow, among his circle of noble acquaintance was Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex. This Earl of Essex would seem to have been an honest and good man, but he had just set his hand to that never ending and, I fear, hopeless task of composing Ireland to English rule. It was, at best, a bad and bloody business, and my Lord of Essex made but a poor success of it. He marched and countermarched, killed some hundreds of kerns and gallowglasses, and, if the truth be told, some hundreds of Irish mothers and babies too, and, harassed by failure in Ireland and faction at home, was glad to give up the task of quieting Ireland to his friend. Henry Sidney, who tried milder measures with but little better success. But before my Lord of Essex could get back to England he was seized with a violent illness, which proved the death of him. On his deathbed, says his chronicler, his chief care was for his children, lamenting the time which is so ungodly, lest they should learn of this vile world. "O my poor children," would he say, "God bless you and give you of his grace." Perhaps the dying father knew that the impetuous temper of his children portended for them a stormy career. At all events their after life justified his apprehensions. This Earl of Essex, like Henry Sidney, had a son and a daughter, Robert and Penelope Devereux, and the story of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, and of Penelope, his sister, is quite as famous and romantic as that of Philip and Mary Sidney, but unhappily theirs is not so fair a fame. Penelope Devereux was only thirteen years old when her father died. Four years later she was the most beautiful woman in England. Not Bessie Throgmorton, the fair maid of honor who became Walter Raleigh's wife, not Lucy Harrington, the lovely Countess of Bedford, not even her own cousin, the charming Eliza beth Vernon, Helen of the Elizabethan poets, whom Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, wooed for five years and braved the anger of his sovereign to marry at last, none of these, nor any other woman whose portrait or story has come down to us, can have had, I think, the strangely fascinating beauty, the wild, impetuous charm of Penelope Devereux. Strangely enough, no portrait of her painted by brush of artist is known to be in existence; yet her beauty has been so enshrined in poetry that it is not difficult to image it. Her abundant hair was of that hue of tawny gold which catches every gleam of the sun and shines in lustrous glimmerings,-"beams of gold caught in a net," said her lover. But her complexion, in strange and striking contrast to her hair, was dark, her cheek a kindly claret, her face like Juliet's, full of the warm South; and her eyes, under raven brows and lashes, were as black as night, now soft and melting, now glowing with an imperial radiance. These eyes were the marvel of her face,"black stars, twin children of the sun," as her lover calls them, and one can fancy as he reads her story that he sees through all the darks of the past the soft splendor of their beauty. This woman with a face of such startling beauty, "day with its golden lights in her hair, night and starlight in her eyes," as one admirer says; this woman with the pride of a house that bore high rank in Normandy before ever the Conqueror set foot in England: this was the woman who should have found her home and her fame as the wife of Philip Sidney. They had been intended for each other from childhood, and when Penelope Devereux's father lay dying he sent a message of regret to Philip Sidney that he could not live to call him son. But as the girl grew to womanhood the match was broken off,-no one knows why or by whom,-and before she was nineteen Penelope Devereux was forced by her guardians to marry one of the richest and one of the basest men in England, Lord Rich, a sordid, cold, brutal young fellow who had inherited the vast stealings of his father, Chancellor Rich. She loathed the man; she protested at the very altar, but in vain; and too late Philip Sidney awoke to find, as it would seem from some of his sonnets, that he had pressed his suit too languidly, and that his lady was already given to another. It was then that he wrote that series of sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, on which his fame as a poet-and as a loverrests. In spite of the over-elaborate diction of the time in which they are written, I do not see how any one can read them without feeling that it is the genuine love of a genuine man that is written here, that Sidney, as he says in his first sonnet, looked in his heart and wrote. And let it be said in charitable memory of Penelope Devereux, that there is nothing in these sonnets to cast any shadow on her fame. Love to the cold and sordid man to whom she had been wedded was out of the question; but I think there is no reason to doubt her truth to him while Philip Sidney lived. Very touching and very significant are the earnest, passionate lines in the eighth song, in which Sidney tells how his lady returned his love: Astrophel, sayd she, my loue, Cease, in these effects, to proue; Thy griefe more then death would grieue me. If those eyes you praised, be Halfe so deare as you to me, Let me home returne, starke blinded Of those eyes, and blinder minded. If to secret of my hart, I do any wish impart, Where thou art not formost placed, Trust me, while I thee deny, Therefore, deare, this no more moue, |