ending, a kindly wish for the
hardened enemies of poetry: "Yet this much curse I must send you, in the
behalfe of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never
get favour, for lacking skill of a sonnet: and when you die, your memory
die from the earth, for want of an epitaph."

Neither did Sidney lack epitaphs; all the poets wept for him; nor was he
wanting in those favours that a sonnet can win, for he wrote the most
passionate that appeared in England before those of Shakespeare. Like
the "Apologie" they move us by their youth and sincerity; they come from
the heart:

"Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,
That She, dear She! might take some pleasure of my paine:

* * * * *

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine;
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Som fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sun-burn'd brain:
But words came halting forth ...
Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite:
'Foole!' said my Muse to me, 'looke in thy heart, and write!'"[188]

Unfortunately, when Sidney took up his pen to write his "Arcadia,"[189]
he no longer looked into his heart; he loosed the rein of his
imagination, and, without concerning himself with a critical posterity
for whom the book was not destined, he only wished, like Lyly, to write
a romance for ladies, or rather for one lady, his sister, the Countess
of Pembroke, famous as his sister, famous as a patron of letters,[190]
famous also as the mother of William Herbert, the future friend of
Shakespeare, the "W. H." for whom in all probability the sonnets of the
great poet were written. Sidney sent the sheets to his sister as fast as
he penned them, charging her to destroy them, a thing she did not do.
The poet knight only saw in it an amusement for himself and for the
Countess, and he gave free vent to his fondness for poetical prose: "For
severer eyes it is not," says he to his sister, "being but a trifle and
that triflingly handled. Your deare selfe can best witnesse the manner,
being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the
rest by sheetes, sent unto you as fast as they were done. In summe, a
young head, not so well staied as I would it were (and shall bee when
God will) having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not beene in
some way delivered, would h