ak into twenty bubbles, as "not content to have the picture of
their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set
forth the miniature of them." And even a passage which should be
tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with
conceits like these: "For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued
weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling
lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death; in
her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the
rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the
wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties;
so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest
white," etc.

The _Arcadia_, like _Euphues_, was a lady's book. It was the favorite
court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its
sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady
for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been {85}
dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.

"Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learn'd and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."

Sidney's _Defense of Poesy_, composed in 1581, but not printed till
1595, was written in manlier English than the _Arcadia_, and is one of
the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical
time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, _Astrophel
and Stella_, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich
(with whom he was not at all in love), according to the conventional
usage of the amourists.

Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at
Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent, sent to
help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his
giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, "Thy
necessity is yet greater than mine." Sidney was England's darling, and
there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain
"the meed of some melodious tear." Spenser's _Ruins of Time_ were
among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was
by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known.