Brooke long afterwards, "I will report no other wonder but

this, that though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man; with such staidness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years; his talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind, so as even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually read or taught." From Shrewsbury school Sidney proceeded in 1568 to Christ church, Oxford, where he seems to have remained until 1571. In 1572, through the influence of his uncle, the earl of Leicester, who, whatever his faults, was always strongly attached to Sidney, and with leave to travel for two years, he accompanied the earl of Lincoln, sent ambassador to Paris, there to negotiate a match between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke D'Alençon, the younger brother of Charles IX. of France. Leicester gave him letters of recommendation to the English envoy at Paris, Sir Francis Walsingham, and in Walsingham's house he was safe during the massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was perpetrated at the time of Sidney's first brief stay of three months in the French metropolis, and which naturally strengthened his protestant feeling. Immediately afterwards Sidney left Paris for a tour in Germany and Italy. He studied, he saw the world, and he keenly watched the current of continental politics—an inspection which, making him feel the danger of the growing power of Spain and of the apathy of the European princes, led him to think of the great part that might be played by England as the protectress of European protestantism. One important personal result of his continental tour was the acquaintance of Hubert Languet, whom he met at Frankfort, where Languet was the secret minister of the elector of Saxony. Languet—who had been converted from Catholicism by Melancthon, and enjoyed the friendship of such leaders of the protestant cause as Duplessis-Mornay—was fifty-four, Sidney eighteen. But an affectionate friendship was at once formed between them, and a correspondence sprang up, to which we owe the knowledge of much that is interesting in Sidney's biography, and in which Languet plays the part of a loving Mentor. On his return home, and under the auspices of his uncle, Lord Leicester, he became a courtier, and fell in love with Penelope, the young daughter of the earl of Essex, whose widow Leicester married. Lord Essex encouraged the match with Sidney, but he died in 1576, and four years afterwards she was married by her guardians against her will to Sir Robert Rich, the wealthy heir of Lord-chancellor Rich, and a most unamiable man. Lady Rich is the Stella of Sidney's amatory poetry. His love for her survived her marriage, and its later story is one of the few blots upon his otherwise almost stainless career. Twenty months of court-life elapsed, and in 1577, at the early age of twenty-two, Sidney was sent abroad on a diplomatic mission of some importance. The Emperor Maximilian and the elector palatine had died within a few days of each other. The new emperor, Rudolph, was as bigoted as his father was tolerant. Of the elector palatine's two sons, both protestants, the elder favoured Lutheranism and persecuted Calvinism, of which the younger was a champion. Sidney proceeded as ambassador of Queen Elizabeth to Vienna and Heidelberg, nominally to offer his royal mistress's condolence, but really to promote union among the reformed states of Germany. He performed his mission to the satisfaction of his sovereign and her ministers. He made the acquaintance of William of Orange, who at once formed a high opinion of him, and he enlarged his knowledge of continental politics, which were not then in a state to encourage his hopes of a strong protestant union of German princes. Returning home he found his sister Mary—"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother"—married to the lord of Wilton; but against the advantages of this fine match was to be set off the discomfort in which his father found himself in the discharge of his duties as lord-deputy of Ireland, harassed by the queen's avarice and partiality for Ormond. Though a courtier, and dependent for his advancement on the favour of his irritable sovereign, Sidney with noble spirit pleaded his father's cause, and not unsuccessfully. He was growing to be a favourite of the queen's, and the first of his known literary compositions is a masque, "The Lady of the May," performed in honour of his royal mistress during her visit to Lord Leicester at Wanstead in May, 1578. But court-life, with its empty round of sycophancy and ceremony, was growing very distasteful to him. He thought sometimes of joining his fate to that of such adventurous mariners as Frobisher. Chiefly, however, his earnest attention was fixed on the continent, and on the great controversy waging there, in which he wished England to take the side of protestantism. So high was his reputation even abroad as a sagacious friend of the protestant cause, that, in 1579, William the Silent desired Fulke Greville to tell Queen Elizabeth in his name, that "her majesty had in Mr. Philip Sidney one of the ripest and greatest statesmen that he knew of in all Europe." But the bold continental enterprises which Sidney recommended were not favoured at court, and even when a chance of foreign employment did once offer itself, he yielded to the wishes of his father, who desired his interest at court. As a relief from the weariness of court-life Sidney turned to literature. In the year of the composition and performance of his courtly masque, "The Lady of the May," he was addressed in a eulogistic Latin poem by Gabriel Harvey (q.v.), the friend of Spenser. By Harvey Spenser was introduced to Sidney, and in 1579, while William the Silent praised Sidney's statesmanship, Spenser was at Penshurst dedicating the Shepherd's Calendar to Sidney, and forming with Fulke Greville and others of Sidney's friends a club which was to create a new school of poetry. Sidney's cultivation of literature was soon encouraged by circumstances. In the autumn of 1579 the duke of Anjou (as the duke of Alençon had become) renewed his suit to Elizabeth, who favoured it. The marriage was supported by the earl of Oxford, opposed by Sidney as unpatriotic and anti-protestant. An insult offered by Oxford to Sidney playing at tennis was promptly resented by the receiver, and the queen for the first time lectured her young, handsome, and gifted courtier. Early in 1580 he had the courage to become the mouth-piece of the anti-French party, and in a long and elaborate, a firm though a respectful letter, he indicated to the queen the dangers of the French matrimonial alliance. He was punished, if punishment it were, by temporary exile from court. He found a home at Wilton with his sister, its mistress, the countess of Pembroke, "learned, fair, and good," as Ben Jonson's epitaph declares her to have been. With her he began their joint metrical translation of the Psalms, and by her express desire the composition of the "Arcadia," continued afterwards at court. None of Sidney's more famous writings were printed in his lifetime, but some of them were well known in MS.; Puttenham, in his Art of English Poetry, published in 1582, and probably written years before, speaking of him as one of the most famous writers of the age for "eclogue and pastoral poetry." To the period immediately succeeding the visit to Wilton may be ascribed the composition of the "Defence of Poesy;" and his "Astrophel and Stella," in which he celebrated his love for Penelope Rich, was doubtless the work of years, reflecting the changeful course of his unfortunate attachment. The tranquil and intellectual seclusion of Wilton was exchanged for court life in October, 1580, when probably through the influence of Leicester, who had been forgiven a few months earlier, Sidney was recalled and received again into favour by the queen. The next five years of his life were years of varied effort and activity. He sat in the parliament of 1581, and at the tournament in May the same year, held on the arrival of the French ambassadors to arrange the marriage of Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou, Sidney was one of the four champions—the earl of Arundel, Fulke Greville, and Lord Windsor being the other three—who challenged all comers. Early in 1582 he was among the courtiers, Raleigh being another, deputed by the queen to escort the duke of Anjou to the continent. In January, 1583, he was knighted, that he might be qualified to act as proxy for his friend Prince Casimir, who could not in person be installed as a knight of the garter. About the same time he received from Queen Elizabeth a grant of three millions of acres in the unknown parts of America. Schemes of adventurous colonization in the west were still floating in Sidney's mind, and so well known was his enthusiasm in the cause that it was to Sidney Hakluyt dedicated the first edition of his voyages, 1582. But new ties kept Sidney at home. Having conquered his passion for Stella, he married, probably in the spring of 1583, Frances, daughter of his old friend Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's famous secretary of state, and for a year or so he lived in retirement. After his return to court, came the news of the death both of the duke of Anjou and of William the Silent, in the summer of 1585, followed by the surrender of town after town in the Netherlands to the victorious duke of Parma. Once more, according to Fulke Greville, Sidney