omance: disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles,
jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots
against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the
real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of
pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the fairy land of Spenser.

Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that
he

did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes.

Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as "Italianated" as
Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose.
His "Sidneian showers of sweet discourse" sowed every page of the
_Arcadia_ with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his
contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer age finds
insipid. This splendid vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in
Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he
describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a ruddy
show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty." If he
describes ladies bathing in the stream, he makes the water break 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 a
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 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
dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.