e of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of
expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has
been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was
itself to spring.

[Sidenote: Sidney.]

For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most
affected and detestable of Euphuists; and "that beauty in Court which
could not parley Euphuism," a courtier of Charles the First's time tells
us, "was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French."
The fashion however passed away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney
shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence.
Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and
perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair
as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in
temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of
the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the
literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had
travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning
and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a
friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of
Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the
wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a
knight-errant. "I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he
says, "that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." He
flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay
dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give
it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy
necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's
nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his
freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his
affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight,
pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet
strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poetry" the
youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour
and grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one
work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of
Sidney's style remains the same.

[Sidenote: The