...(1580). Sidney says of the Ballad of Chevy Chase: 'Certainly, I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that...not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder [fiddler], with no rougher voice than rude style; which, being...

...poetry, whether heroic or lyrical, draws Sidney's highest, most sustained praise.66 He confesses that he 'never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that...not my heart moved more than with a trumpet,' and he praises the feasts he attended in Hungary, with their 'songs of their ancestors' valour' (97.10-12,...

..."I never Heard the old song of Percie and Douglas," wrote Sir Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poesy, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." Such recent triumphs as Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, or Robert Fagles's translations of Homer and Virgil,...