when I opened it for a few hours to the public, more
than twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with the highest
panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once more shut it off from view,
everyone brought sonnets, with Latin and Greek verses: for the
University of Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and
scholars kept vying with each other who could produce the best.

I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of this University thus
employing the Long Vacation; as perhaps we shall wait some time for
another Perseus to excite them to it. But I do ask you to consider that
the Perseus was not entirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that
the age when men are eager about great work is the age when great work
gets itself done; nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were,
likely enough, very bad ones--in Charles Lamb's phrase, very like what
Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool. It is the
impetus that I ask of you: the will to try.

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your
preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold
'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek
sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from
Cambridge. But I plead that they should be balanced, as they were in the
perfect young knight with whose words I will conclude to-day:--

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent by that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make.
How far they shot awry! the true cause is,
Stella looked on; and from her heavenly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

'Untrue,' you say? Well, there is truth of emotion as well as of fact;
and who is there among you but would fain be able not only to win such a
guerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady's feet?

That then was Philip Sidney, called the peerless one of his age; and
perhaps no Englishman ever lived more graciously or, having used life,
made a better end.