-who should have been his patron through
life--the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from
his venerable AEsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the
matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself
upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered.

[Footnote 1: Graium _tantum vidit_.]

SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY

Sydney's Sonnets--I speak of the best of them--are among the very best
of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity,
and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his
compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton,
censuring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort
of after-tune or application), "vain and amatorious" enough, yet the
things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may
be "full of worth and wit." They savour of the Courtier, it must be
allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a Courtier
when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier
when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin,
he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time
had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution,
there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that
emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not
want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French
match may testify, he could speak his mind freely to Princes. The
times did not call him to the scaffold.

The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the
compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about
to produce, were written in the very hey-day of his blood. They are
stuck full of amorous fancies--far-fetched conceits, befitting his
occupation; for True Love thinks no labour to send out Thoughts
upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich
pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in
self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the
Beloved. We must be Lovers--or at least the cooling touch of time,
the _circum praecordia frigus_, must not have so damped our faculties,
as to take away our recollection that we were once so--before we can
duly appreciate the glorious vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of
the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by som