and ended his days as the respected father of a family, in calm, unostentatious privacy. One thing I will confess:-It is natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal.—And yet when I had ransacked all that had ever been written, discovered, or surmised, relative to Shakspeare's private life, for the purpose of throwing some light upon his Sonnets, I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view-it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with commonplace, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what, the mighty spirit who in dying left behind him not merely a name and fame, but a perpetual being, a presence and a power, identified with our nature, diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an uncontrollable and universal sway! I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all!-the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia, and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the POET OF WOMANKIND. CHAPTER XVI. SYDNEY'S STELLA. AT the very name of Sir Philip Sydney,-the generous, gallant, all-accomplished Sydney,—the roused fancy wakes, as at the sound of a silver trumpet, to all the gay and splendid associations of chivalry and romance. He was in the court of Elizabeth, what Surrey had been in that of her father, Henry the Eighth; and like his prototype, Sir Calidore in the Fairy Queen,— Every look and word that he did say Was like enchantment, that through both the ears And as Surrey had his Fair Geraldine, Sydney had his STELLA. Simplicity was not the fashion of Elizabeth's age in any particular: the conversation and the poetry addressed by her stately romantic courtiers to her and her maids of honour, were like the dresses they wore,-stiff with jewels and standing on end with embroidery, gorgeous of hue and fantastic in form; but with many a brilliant gem of exceeding price, scattered up and down, where one would scarce think to find them; losing something of their effect by being misplaced, but none of their inherent beauty and value. The poetry of Sir Philip Sydney was extravagantly admired in his own time, and it has since been less read than it deserves. It contains much of the pedantic quaintness, the laboured ornament, the cumbrous phraseology, which was the taste, the language of the day but he had elegance of mind and tenderness of feeling; above all, he was in earnest, and accordingly, there are beautiful and brilliant things scattered through both his poetry and prose. If his " Phoenix-Stella" be less popularly celebrated than the Fair Geraldine,-her name less intimate with our fancy,-it is not be cause her poet lacked skill to immortalize her in superlatives: it is the recollection of the mournful fate and darkened fame of that beautiful but ill-starred woman, contrasted with the brilliant career and spotless glory of her lover, which strikes the imagination with a painful contrast, and makes us reluctant to dwell on her memory. The Stella of Sydney's poetry, and the Philoclea of his Arcadia, was the Lady Penelope Devereux, the elder sister of the favourite Essex. While yet in her childhood, she was the destined bride of Sydney, and for several years they were considered as almost engaged to each other it was natural, therefore, at this time, that he should be accustomed to regard her with tenderness and unreproved admiration, and should gratify both by making her the object of his poetical raptures. She was also less openly, but even more ardently, loved by young Charles Blount, afterwards Lord Mountjoy, who seems to have disputed with Sydney the first place in her heart. She is described as a woman of exquisite beauty, on a grand and splendid scale; dark |