human mind than from those of nature; for not only is there a Divine essence in man, but the Divinity manifests itself in him far more sublimely than in nature. God is Spirit, and consequently His truest instrument and medium is man."

An idealistic nature like Sidney's would naturally

consider poetry independent of versification, and define it design.

by qualities he felt to be more important than those of metre and rhyme.

"It is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate." If poets have chosen verse as their fittest raiment," it is because the dignity of their subject leads them to distinguish their language from all other modes of discourse, "not speaking words as they chanceably fall from the mouth," but "there have been many most excellent poets, that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets." The "Cyropedia" of Xenophon is not in verse but is a perfect heroic poem. For poetry is truly a creation, and that in a more absolute sense than any other of the arts, which have their matter given them to form and fashion: in painting (here I paraphrase Sidney rather than transcribe him) the idea is incorporated in form and colour; in music the sentiment is identified with sound, to say nothing of sculpture and architecture, arts too visibly material to require mention. But the poet spins his own web, and has to give form only to the conceptions of his own imagination; "for him," says Hegel, " even words are only an accessory, they are mere signs and simply a means of transmission of thought, and the mind is brought face to face only with itself." A poet, "lifted up with the vigour of his own invention," can not only create a world better than nature but also new forms " such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like, freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit." Sidney gives the Greek etymology of the word poet,

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and makes several comments upon it; he evidently has in his mind, although he does not quote it, the passage of Plato in the " Banquet." Banquet." "Poetry is complex and manifold, and all creation or passage of non-being into being, is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative, and the masters of arts are all poets."

The essence of poetry thus being defined, Sidney proceeds to show its practical value and merit, and here the moral and platonic tendencies of his soaring mind especially reveal themselves. To refine the mind, to enrich the memory, to sharpen the judgment, to enlarge the domain of thought, constitutes the ordinary notion of education; but "the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of." Therefore the art that best serves this end "has the most just title to be prince over all the rest." And he proceeds to show how, in this, poetry outsteps all other competitors, and is of greater moral efficacy than philosophy or history.

He then personifies Philosophy and History, between whom a brilliant and animated discussion ensues, touching their respective value as teachers of mankind; the conclusion finally arrived at is that the one gives the precept and the other gives the example. But philosophy is obscure and cold and misty, and its teaching is so general and abstract that "happy is that man who may understand it, and more happy he that can apply what he doth understand."

History is wanting in the Ideal, it clings to crude facts, and to that which is,-not to principles and to that which should be; the examples that she boasts of producing are not always good to imitate, and convey a less wholesome teaching than the precepts of philosophy. But the poet, the peerless poet (Sidney never mentions the poet or poetry that takes the heart captive without giving vent to his affectionate admiration in some

i

enthusiastic epithet) weds precept to example, and while philosophy confines itself to telling us that such and such things should be done, the poet gives us a perfect picture of it in the conduct of his characters; and thus where philosophy can only bestow "a wordish description," which has no very powerful effect upon the mind, the poet everywhere sheds life.

"Tully," says Sidney, "taketh much pains to make us know the force, love of our country hath in us. Let us but hear old Anchises speaking in the midst of Troy's flames, or see Ulysses, in the fulness of Calypso's delights, bewail his absence from barren and beggarly Ithaca. Anger, the Stoics say, was a short madness; let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger than finding in the schoolmen its genus and difference. See whether wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, valour in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an ignorant man carry not an apparent shining; and contrarily, the remorse of conscience in Edipus, the soon-repenting pride of Agamemnon, the self-devouring cruelty in his father Atreus, the violence of ambition in the two Theban brothers, the sour-sweetness of revenge in Medea, and to fall lower, the Terentian Gnatho, and our Chaucer's Pandar, so expressed that we now use their names to signify their trades."

The fable related by Menenius Agrippa, that of the prophet Nathan, the parables of the Gospels, and a thousand examples taken from antiquity sacred and profane, are brought forward by Sidney in his desire to show that poetry is the "most excellent workman" in teaching virtue, and he bestows upon the poet the ingenious appellation of the "popular philosopher."

There is, according to him, more to be learned from the "feigned" Cyrus of Xenophon than from the real Cyrus of Justin, from the imaginary Eneas of Virgil than from the actual Eneas of Dares of Phrygia. History is too often illogical and unjust, "for see we not valiant Miltiades rot in his fetters? The just Phocion and the accomplished Socrates put to death like traitors? The

cruel Severus live prosperously? The excellent Severus miserably murdered? Sylla and Marius dying in their beds. Pompey and Cicero slain then when they would have thought exile a happiness?"

Poetry has none of these iniquities; if it makes Ulysses undergo storms and other rude trials, it is simply with the intent of giving scope to his patience and magnanimity, "to make them shine the more in the nearfollowing prosperity; and of the contrary part, if evil men come to the stage they ever go out so manacled, as they little animate folks to follow them."

Sidney mentions four objections commonly raised against poetry, and refutes them one after the other. The discussion is not of equal interest throughout, but nothing could be more witty than his answer to the second objection, that poets are liars :

"Of all writers under the sun, the poet is the least liar: and though he would, as a poet can scarcely be a liar, the astronomer with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape, when they take upon them to measure the height of the stars. How often, think you, do the physicians lie when they aver things, good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they came to his ferry. And no less of the rest which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet he nothing affirms and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false. So as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape. from many lies. But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth. He citeth not authorities of other histories, but, even for his entry, calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention: in troth, not labouring to tell you what is, or is not, but what should or should not be and therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not, without we will say, that Nathan lied in his speech to David. Which, as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I, none so simple would say that Æsop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who thinks that Esop writ it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of."

With regard to the sentence in which Plato banished

poets out of his Republic, the platonist Sidney gets out of the difficulty by saying that Plato here found fault with the poets of his time who "filled the world with wrong opinions of the Gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence," and that it was the abuse of poetry and not the real thing that he wished to banish, and he adds that to get at Plato's real opinion about poetry, we have but to read his beautiful dialogue called "Ion,” “in which he giveth high and rightly divine commendation to poetry."

The last pages of the treatise are dedicated to the examination of the then existing condition of English poetry, which, according to Sidney, was one of little. brilliancy. Other nations put England to shame, and preceding ages, agitated as they were and disturbed by war, had nevertheless produced greater poets than those of his own peaceful times. "Now that an over-faint quietness should seem to strew the house for poets, they are almost in as good reputation as the mountebanks at Venice."

Although this severity on Sidney's part shows that he was not altogether free from the prejudice that occasionally prevents the most sane and liberal minds from rendering justice to their own period, it can nevertheless in a great measure be justified, for it must be remembered that at the time when he was writing nothing was known of Shakespeare, and Spenser had not, as yet, added his "Faerie Queen" to the treasures of the world.

Looking back to earlier poets, Sidney pronounces Chaucer to have done excellently well in his poem of "Troilus and Cressida," which, he says, no succeeding age has equalled; he also gives praise, however, though not unreservedly, to more modern productions, such as Sackville's" Mirrour for Magistrates," the Lyrics of the Earl of Surrey, and the "Shepherd's Calendar."