absence of a "little wolf," and whether Gynecia, in spite of the
oblivion which has gathered over her, does not deserve a place by the
side of the passionate heroines of Marlowe and Webster rather than in a
gallery of Lancret-like characters.

Sidney, thus possesses the merit, unique at that time with prose
writers, of varying his subjects by marking its _nuances_ and by
describing in his romance different kinds of love. Side by side with
Gynecia's passion, he has set himself to paint the love of an old man in
Basilius, of a young man in Pyrocles, of a young girl in Pamela. This
last study led him to portray a scene which was to be represented again
by one of the great novelists of the eighteenth century. Richardson
borrowed from Sidney, with the name of Pamela, the idea of the adventure
that shows her a prisoner of her enemies, imploring heaven that her
virtue may be preserved. The wicked Cecropia who keeps Sidney's Pamela
shut up, laughs heartily at her invocations: "To thinke," she says,
"that those powers, if there be any such, above, are moved either by the
eloquence of our prayers, or in a chafe at the folly of our actions,
carries as much reason, as if flies should thinke that men take great
care which of them hums sweetest, and which of them flies nimblest."
Pamela, "whose cheeks were dyed in the beautifullest graine of vertuous
anger," replies by speeches which yield in nothing as regards nobility
and dignity, and length also, to those of her future sister, and which
are followed as in Richardson, by an unexpected deliverance. These
speeches are famous for yet another reason; they are said to have been
recited in one of the most terrible crises of the history of England and
were not this time followed by a deliverance. Charles I., it is
reported, had copied out, and recited a short time before his death, the
eloquent prayers to God, of the young heroine of Sidney's novel. It
seems that Pamela's prayer figured among the papers that he gave with
his own hand, at the last moment, to the prelate who was attending him:
and the Puritans, Milton especially, uttered loud cries, and saw in this
reminiscence of the artist-prince, an insult to the divine majesty.
"This King," writes the poet, "hath as it were unhallowed and
unchristened the very duty of prayer itself, by borrowing to a Christian
use prayers offered to a heathen god. Who would have imagined so little
fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little reve