iliarity with the legends of Arthur,
together with his own gallantry and love of adventure, peculiarly
adapted him to describe martial scenes. But the chivalry of Sir Philip
is not more apparent where he describes the shock of arms than where,
with such exquisite delicacy, he writes of women. The student of
English fiction would fain linger long over the pages which describe
the loves of Pamela and Philoclea. For when these pages are laid aside,
it is long before he may again meet with the poetry, the manly and
womanly sentiment, and the pure yet stirring passion which adorn the
romance of Elizabeth's Philip. Three centuries have passed away since
the "Arcadia" was written, and we who live at the end of this period
not unjustly congratulate ourselves on our superior civilization and
refinement. And yet in all this time we have arrived of no higher
conception of feminine virtue or chivalrous manhood than is to be found
in this sixteenth-century romance, and during one half of these three
hundred years there was to be seen so little trace of such a
conception, whether in life or in literature, that the word love seemed
to have lost its nobler meaning and to stand for no more than animal
desire. There is not in English fiction a more charming picture of
feminine modesty than that of Pamela hiding her love for Musidorus.

How delightfull soeuer it was, my delight might well bee in my
soule, but it neuer wente to looke out of the window to doe him any
comforte. But how much more I found reason to like him, the more I
set all the strength of my minde to conceale it. * * * Full often
hath my breast swollen with keeping my sighes imprisoned: full
often have the teares I draue back from mine eyes turned back to
drowne my heart. But, alas, what did that helpe poore Dorus?[77]

Hardly less beautiful is the gradual yielding, through pity, of
Pamela's maidenly heart.

This last dayes danger having made Pamela's loue discerne what a
losse it should haue suffered if Dorus had beene destroyed, bred
such tendernesse of kindnesse in her toward him, that she could no
longer keepe loue from looking out through her eyes, and going
forth in her words; whom before as a close prisoner, shee had to
her heart onely committed: so as finding not onely by his speeches
and letters, but by the pitifull oration of a languishing behaviour,
and the easily deciphered character of a sorrowfull