Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/211

Herbert August she entertained there, for the first of many times, her brother Philip. On Newyear's day 1578 she came to court to present a richly embroidered doublet of lawn to the queen. On 8 April 1580 her first child, William [q. v.], was born at Wilton.

From March to August 1580 Philip Sidney, who was in disfavour at court, stayed at Wilton in close attendance on his sister. The most perfect accord characterised their relations with one another, and they spent much time together in literary studies. A library, since dispersed, was first formed at Wilton in her time, and included much Italian literature (, Natural Hist. p. 86). In the summer of 1580 they seem to have retired to a small house at Ivy Church, near Wilton, in which (according to Aubrey), the countess ‘much delighted,’ and it was probably there that Sidney, at his sister's desire and suggestion, began his ‘Arcadia.’ When dedicating to her, a year or two later, the completed manuscript—which he entitled ‘The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia’ —he wrote that ‘it is done for you, only to you … being done on loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done.’ At the same time brother and sister laboured at a metrical translation of the Psalms. On 5 May 1586 the countess lost her father, and on 11 Aug. following her mother. But more poignant grief was caused her in the same year by the death of Sir Philip Sidney at Antwerp on 17 Oct. When she recovered from the blow, she applied herself to the literary tasks which he had left unfinished or had contemplated; took under her protection the many men of letters to whom he had acted as patron, and gave pathetic expression to her personal sorrow in a poem published by Spenser with his ‘Astrophel’(1595), and awkwardly named by him ‘The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda.’

The ‘Arcadia,’ which had for some years been circulated in manuscript, was first printed in 1590, 4to, by William Ponsonby without consultation with the author's friends. The edition dissatisfied the countess, and she undertook its revision. She divided the work into five instead of three books, supplied new passages from manuscript copies in her possession, and rewrote some portions. When the corrected edition was issued in 1593 (fol.), the reader was informed in a prefatory address that the countess's ‘honorable labour,’ which had begun ‘in correcting the faults,’ had ‘ended in supplying the defects’ of the original work. In 1598 another edition appeared, under her auspices, with further changes from her pen, together with an appendix of her brother's poems, which she had carefully corrected in the desire of superseding two unauthorised editions which had been issued in 1591. In pursuit of her brother's design, and in accord with her own fervent piety, she completed at Wilton, in May 1590, ‘A Discourse of Life and Death,’ from the French of her brother's friend Plessis du Mornay (London, 1593 and 1600), and in November 1590, while at her husband's house at Ramsbury, rendered into blank verse Robert Garnier's French tragedy of ‘Antonie,’ adding some choral lyrics of her own. It was first published in 1592. The metrical version of the Psalms, which she and her brother had begun, she finished, but did not publish, much to the regret of Sir John Harington and other of her admirers. Her chaplain, Gervase Babington, is said to have assisted her in the undertaking. Many manuscript copies were circulated, and a copy in the Bodleian Library shows that Sidney was responsible for the first forty-three psalms, and the countess for the remainder. Another manuscript copy is among the Additional MSS. at the British Museum (Nos. 12047-8). One psalm (cxxxvii.) was printed by Steele in the ‘Guardian,’ No. 18. Extracts appeared in Harington's ‘Nugæ Antiquæ,’ and in the volume of ‘Sidneiana’ issued by the Roxburghe Club; but the whole was first printed by Robert Triphook in 1823. Lady Pembroke's verse has few poetic qualities, but shows culture and literary feeling. According to Aubrey her ‘genius lay as much towards chymistrie as poetrie’ (Nat. Hist, of Witts, ed. Britton, p. 89).

The countess appears to higher advantage as the generous patron of poets and men of letters, who acknowledged her kind services in glowing eulogies. Meres, in his ‘Palladis Tamia' (1598), compares her to Octavia, Augustus's sister and Virgil's patroness, and describes her as not only being ‘very liberal unto poets,’ but as ‘a most delicate poet,’ worthy of the complimentary lines which Antipater Sidonius addressed to Sappho. Her earliest protégés were her brother's friends. Spenser dedicated to her his ‘Ruines of Time,’ written about 1590, in memory of Sidney (cf. also 11. 316-22). He describes her in ‘Colin Clout's Come Home Again’ (1595), 11. 481-99, under the name of 'Urania, sister unto Astrofell,' as ‘the well of bountie and brave mynd,’ and ‘the ornament of womankind;’ while in ‘Astrophel’ he writes that she closely resembled her brother, ‘both in shape and spright,’ and in a dedicatory sonnet prefixed to the ‘Faerie Queene,’ that ‘his goodly image’ lives ‘in the divine resemblance of your face.’ 