o remain abroad, and spent nearly three
years traveling in France, Germany, and Italy. But these three years
were not given up to sight-seeing and social enjoyment. Sidney devoted
his time to studying literature, science, music, foreign languages, and
the politics of the day.

For two great reasons this last subject was of most vital interest to
him: it was the time of a great religious upheaval throughout Europe,
and also the time of the ambitious aggressions of Spain under Philip II.

Sidney, an ardent adherent of the Church of England, conceived the idea
of championing his beloved faith, even as the knights of old had
championed theirs. Then, too, his whole heart was with his native
country in her rapid rise to a place of power among the nations of
earth, and he recognized Spain as an ever-present menace to her
advancement.

His sympathies were especially aroused for the condition of the harassed
Netherlands, to the complete subjugation of which Spain was then bending
her strongest efforts. Then it was that Sidney's chivalric spirit took
fire with hope,--the hope that his beloved England would rise and
deliver the oppressed, and that he, her son, would be allowed to be her
humble instrument in the great and glorious work.

All that was seething in his fertile brain he wrote from time to time to
England; and he kept her statesmen informed of the state of foreign
politics in a time when newspapers and telegraph lines had not been
dreamed of. All unconsciously, he was making a name for himself in
England; and when he returned, at the age of twenty-one, he found that
he had established for himself a reputation as politician, statesman,
and man of letters.

While abroad, Sidney had been associated with "many men of many minds."
He had learned to think and feel deeply on deep subjects, and had formed
definite ideals as to a man's proper part in life. He came back to his
native land with his young heart filled with hopes that were never to be
realized--at least, not in the way that he had conceived. It is true
that he was one of a brilliant circle of men who made the England of
Elizabeth's time great by the very greatness that was theirs; but the
England of Elizabeth's time was not the England of Sidney's hopes, and a
courtiership under the virgin queen was the vanity of vanities to his
heroic spirit. From that time on, life was a struggle to him--a
struggle to live nobly amid a court given over to pleasure; a struggle