United States or Western Sahara ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


After the first greetings were over, Russell drew him aside, and asked, "Pray, my dear Vivian, what brings you here?" "Lord Glistonbury to whom I had not time to say no, he talked so fast. But, after all, why should I say no? I am a free man a discarded lover. I am absolutely convinced that Selina Sidney's refusal will never be retracted; my mother, I know, is of that opinion.

Fain would I show how he fame's paths did tread, But now into such Lab'rinths I am lead, With endless turnes, the way I find not out, How to persist my Muse is more in doubt; Wich makes me now with Silvester confess, But Sidney's Muse can sing his worthiness.

"I think I may call it," said Leicester, "the most notable encounter that hath been in our age, and it will remain to our posterity famous." Nevertheless it is probable that the encounter would have been forgotten by posterity but for the melancholy close upon that field to Sidney's bright career.

Even if insensible to what transpired at Dublin, the indefatigable Sussex-one of the ablest of Elizabeth's able Court-did not suffer him long to misunderstand his relations to the new Queen. He might be Sidney's gossip, but he was not the less Elizabeth's enemy. He had been proclaimed "O'Neil" on the rath of Tullahoge, and had reigned at Dungannon, adjudging life and death.

The main argument of the Apologie may indeed be called a commentary on the saying of Aristotle, cited by Sidney himself, that "Poetry is more philosophical and more studiously serious than History" that is, as Sidney interprets it, than the scientific fact of any kind; or again, on that yet more pregnant saying of Shelley, that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Gosson had denounced poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in Sidney's paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". Sidney replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the most necessary to men.

Those directed specially to me were from a Senator and a Member of Congress, both of whom were lawyers and my personal friends, men in whose judgment I placed great confidence. They all spoke in the highest terms of Mr. Sidney's integrity, ability, and energy, and concluded by saying I might implicitly rely upon his judgment and be governed by his counsels.

Lyly dedicated his Euphues to the "Ladies and Gentlewomen of England" and Sidney's Arcadia owed its vast success to its female readers. The subjects studied followed the orthodox views. Beginning with the reign of Queen Anne boarding-schools for girls became very numerous. At these schools "young Gentlewomen" were "soberly educated" and "taught all sorts of learning fit for young Gentlewomen."

It was lit but by a small reading-lamp, and the bright, steady blaze of the fire; and by this light they both continued to gaze on each other, as if spellbound, in complete silence. At last Philip, by an irresistible impulse, fell upon Sidney's bosom, and, clasping him with convulsive energy, gasped out: "Sidney! Sidney! my mother's son!"

In his "Defence of Poetry" the youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of Sidney's style remains the same.

See ante, March 23, 1776. By an odd mistake, in the first three editions we find a reading in this line to which Dr. Johnson would by no means have subscribed, wine having been substituted for time. That error probably was a mistake in the transcript of Johnson's original letter. The verse quoted is the concluding line of a sonnet of Sidney's: 2 Corinthians, iv. 17.