ad."[199]
The glowing descriptions of the private apartments of the heroes suit
modern palaces better than Greek cottages; while representations of
ladies recumbent on their couches are obvious reminiscences of
Tintoretto or Titian, whose newly painted works Sidney had admired in
Italy. Here is a description of the beautiful Philoclea, resting in her
bedroom; it shows unmistakable signs of Sidney's acquaintance with the
Italian painters: "She at that time lay, as the heate of that country
did well suffer, upon the top of her bed, having her beauties eclipsed
with nothing, but with her faire smocke, wrought all in flames of
ash-colour silk and gold; lying so upon her right side, that the left
thigh down to the foot, yielded hir delightfull proportion to the full
view, which was seene by the helpe of a rich lampe, which thorow the
curtaines a little drawne cast forth a light upon her, as the moone doth
when it shines into a thinne wood."[200]

Sidney, according to his friend Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, had the
highest moral and political purposes, in writing his "Arcadia": "In all
these creatures of his making, his interest and scope was, to turn the
barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life; and in them,
first on the monarchs part, lively to represent the growth, state and
declination of princes, changes of government and lawes ... Then again
in the subjects case, the state of favour, disfavour, prosperitie,
adversity ... and all other moodes of private fortunes or misfortunes,
in which traverses, I know, his purpose was to limn out such exact
pictures of every posture in the minde, that any man might see how to
set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversitie."[201]
When Greville wrote thus, Sidney was dead, and in his retrospect of his
friend's life he was with perfect good faith discovering high, not to
say holy motives, for all his actions. Sidney's own explanation suits
his work better; he was delivering his "young head" of "many, many
fancies," and their main object was not politics, but love. He described
it as it was known and practised in his time. Most of the heroes in the
"Arcadia," talk like Surrey, Wyatt, Watson, and all the "amourists" of
the century, like Sidney himself when he addressed another than Stella.
The modesty of their characters is equal to their tenderness; valiant as
lions before the enemy, they tremble like the leaf before their
mistresses; they feed on smiles