!
And young as beautiful! and soft as young!
And gay as soft! and innocent as gay!
And happy (if aught happy here) as good!
For fortune fond had built her nest on high."[233]

Sidney's popularity did not, of course, last so long without
encountering some opposition. For Milton, and no wonder, the "Arcadia"
was nothing but "a vain amatorious poem," though he is fair enough to
add that it is "in that kind, full of worth and wit."[234] Horace
Walpole was very hard upon our novelist: "We have a tedious, lamentable,
pedantic pastoral romance," says he, in his "Royal and Noble Authors,"
"which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade
through."[235] It is sad to think that the once famous "Castle of
Otranto," though twenty times shorter, requires now no smaller dose of
patience.

[Illustration:
"See the fond youth! he burns, he loves, he dies,
He wishes as he pines and feeds his famish'd eyes."]

None the less, the "Arcadia" was popular in the last century, and, at
the same time as it attracted the attention of fair Leonoras, it also
interested and delighted a much commoner sort of readers. It was several
times printed in an abbreviated form, and circulated, with engravings,
as a chap-book. Sometimes the whole of the "Arcadia" was compressed into
a small volume, sometimes only an episode was given to the public. The
story of Argalus and Parthenia was especially popular.[236] The
engravings, it is needless to say, were very coarse; and if Sidney had
taken little trouble to be historically or geographically accurate, the
wood-block makers took even less, and they offer to our eyes an
extraordinary medley of fifteenth-century knights, Roman soldiers,
gentlemen in flowing wigs and court swords, all of them supposed to have
at one time adorned with their presence the groves of Arcady. A few
specimens of these engravers' art are here given; no doubt the reader
will be pleased to know what the famous Argalus and Parthenia were
supposed to have been like, how the bathing of Philoclea in the Ladon
was represented, and the sorts of fetes and courtly dances that
enlivened the marriage of that princess.

More striking even than these tributes to Sidney's merits as a novelist
is the treatment awarded him in France. The famous Du Bartas in his
second "Week" names Sidney as one of the "three firm pillars of the
English Speech." This speech, according to the French poet, is mainly
supported by