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Charles I. passed many hours of his prison life in reading the "Arcadia," and Milton accused him of stealing a prayer of Pamela to insert in the "Eikon Basilike": "And that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia'; a book in that kind, full of worth and wit, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be named: nor to be read at any time without good caution, much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian's prayerbook."
The chief thing he himself teaches in his Banquet, where he shows us how we should use amatorious matters, turning our minds from sensible goods to things discernible only by the mind, that we ought not to be enslaved by the beauty of any body, study, or learning, but laying aside such weakness, should turn to the vast ocean of beauty.
In Milton's contemptuous reference to Sidney's Arcadia as a vain amatorious poem, we feel that the finer sense of the author of L'Allegro has suffered from immersion in the slough of religious and political faction. Gauden, raking up material from all quarters, had inserted in his compilation a prayer taken from the Arcadia. Milton mercilessly works this topic against his adversary.
Milton, perceiving that such a poetic Fable might be objected to as fitter for a "mere amatorious novel" than for a controversial treatise, insinuates an apology for its introduction. The apology is that some of the wisest and greatest men had allowed the use on occasion of those "highest arcs that human contemplation, circling upwards, can make from the glassy sea whereon she stands."
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