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SID pressed upon the queen and her councillors the necessity for an active support of the protestant cause on the continent, and for strenuous resistance to the formidable power of Spain. But though supported by his father-in-law, Walsingham, he was baffled by the influence of Burleigh, whose do-nothing policy recommended itself for the time to the queen. Sidney turned to official and parliamentary life. He seems to have been a pretty active member of the parliament of 1584-85. In July, 1585, having previously acted as deputy to his uncle, the earl of Warwick, he became associated with him in the mastership of the ordnance, and began immediately to strengthen that important department of the public service. In the midst of these duties he once more thought of adventure in the west, this time with the view of assailing Spain; and he used his influence with all classes of men to promote Drake's famous expedition of 1585, which he himself resolved to join. He was waiting at Plymouth in the autumn of 1585, intending secretly to sail with Drake, when the queen discovered his intention. She despatched a peremptory message, threatening him with disgrace if he sailed; promising him, if he returned, a command in the Low Countries. The policy of action recommended by Sidney had prevailed, and Elizabeth was about to send to the Netherlands an auxiliary force under the command of Leicester. With the appointment of governor of Flushing, Sidney set sail on the 16th November, 1585, and took possession of his office on the 21st. In the following February he led a successful expedition against Axel, and received high praise for his gallantry and skill. In September, 1586, he joined the force under his uncle, Leicester, destined to capture Zutphen, on the possession of which depended the command of the Yssel. Zutphen was invested on the 13th of September, and Sidney was one of three superior officers commissioned to watch it by land, while Leicester guarded the water. On the 21st Leicester received information that a large supply of provisions was collected at Deventer, a few miles up the river, and that an attempt was planned to get them into Zutphen at daybreak on the following morning. Arrangements seem to have been made on both sides for a battle. The morning of the 22nd came, enveloped in a mist so thick that at ten paces nothing could be distinguished. Sidney led a party of horsemen two hundred strong up to the walls of the town. When he reached them with his men, the fog suddenly broke, and they saw before them a body of the enemy's cavalry twice their own strength, while the cannon from the ramparts and the musketeers in the trenches began to play upon them. Three charges were made by the English; Sidney was in all, and in the first his horse was killed under him. He had gone into the field, it is said, properly panoplied; but meeting Sir William Pelham, the lord marshal of the camp, whom he saw to be lightly defended, with reckless chivalry he now threw off his own cuisses. In the last charge, accordingly, he was wounded severely in the thigh, and his new and untrained horse took fright and galloped off the field with him. As he was being carried wounded and in pain, occurred the well known incident thus chronicled by Fulke Greville:—"In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for some drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words, 'Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.'" The wound was to prove a fatal one, as from almost the first Sidney is said to have felt. Removed to Arnheim, he lingered on for five and twenty days under the care of the surgeons, and nursed by his wife, who had joined him previously at Flushing. Such was the anxiety respecting him that even Queen Elizabeth sent a messenger "with comforting letters" and inquiries as to his condition. During his closing days he spoke much of spiritual matters, the immortality of the soul among them. His last words were a valediction addressed to his gallant younger brother, Robert, who had watched by his bedside—"Love my memory, cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator; in me beholding the end of the world with all her vanities." He died in the afternoon of Monday the 17th of October, 1586, a few weeks before completing his thirty-second year. His body was conveyed to England, and on the 16th of February, 1587, it was borne in solemn and public procession through a city of mourners, from the Minories to its resting-place in the churchyard of St. Paul's. Brave, adventurous, spirited, accomplished, affectionate, generous—poet, scholar, patriot, and soldier—Sir Philip Sidney united in his own person all the excellencies which we are accustomed to regard as rife in his time and country, and the circumstances of his death enhance the lustre of his character and life. "Indeed," says his affectionate kinsman, friend, and biographer, Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke), "he was a true model of worth, a man fit for conquest, plantation, reformation, or what action soever is the greatest and hardest among men; withal such a lover of mankind and goodness that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power; like Zephyrus, he giving life when he blew. The universities abroad and at home accounted him a general Mæcenas of learning, dedicated their books to him, and communicated every invention or improvement of knowledge with him. Soldiers honoured him, and were so honoured by him, as no man thought he marched under the true banner of Mars, that had not obtained Sir Philip Sidney's approbation. Men of affairs in most parts of Christendom entertained correspondency with him. But what speak I of these with whom his own ways and ends did concur? Since, to descend, his heart and capacity were so large that there was not a cunning painter, a skilful engineer, an excellent musician, or any other artificer of extraordinary fame that made not himself known to this famous spirit, and found him his true friend and the common rendezvous of worth in his time. Besides, the ingenuity of his nature did spread itself so freely abroad, as who lives that can say he ever did him harm? whereas there be many living that may thankfully acknowledge he did them good. Neither was this in him a private, but a public affection; his chief ends being not friends, wife, children, and himself, but above all things the honour of his Maker and the service of his prince and country." Sidney's chief work was not published until 1590, and then as "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," a title to which it had a double claim; for his sister not only originated it, but considerably altered and added to it before publication. Popular in its own day, this high-flown romance in which old Hellenic characters and scenery are strangely combined with the language and sentiments of christian chivalry and Elizabethan England, is little read now. Much more attractive is the "Defence of Poesie," first published in 1595, in which occurs the well-known reference to the old song of Percy and Douglas, which Sidney never heard but he found his "heart moved more than with a trumpet"—an eloquent and argumentative plaidoyer for the muse against the utilitarians of the Elizabethan age. "Sidney's prose," says Professor Craik in a discriminating criticism, "is the most flowing and poetical that had yet been written in English; but its graces are rather those of artful elaboration than of a vivid natural expressiveness. The thought, in fact, is generally more poetical than the language; it is a spirit of poetry encased in a rhetorical form. Yet, notwithstanding the conceits into which it frequently runs—and which, after all, are mostly rather the frolics of a nimble wit somewhat too solicitous of display, than the sickly perversities of a coxcombical or effeminate taste—and notwithstanding also some want of animation and variety, Sidney's is a wonderful style—always flexible, harmonious, and luminous, and on fit occasions rising to great stateliness and splendour; while a breath of beauty and noble feeling lives in and exhales from the whole of his great work, like the fragrance from a garden of flowers." Besides these two prose works, he wrote in 1584 or 1585, in reply to Leicester's Commonwealth, an angry "Discourse in defence of the Earl of Leicester," not printed until long afterwards by Collins in the Sidney Papers. Sidney's sonnets, most of them contained in his "Astrophel and Stella," first published in 1591 apparently, had sunk into comparative oblivion when they were resuscitated by Charles Lamb in a charming essay, which pointed anew attention to the singular beauty of some of them. The best edition of Sidney's miscellaneous works is that of Gray, Oxford, 1829. "The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney with Hubert Languet, now first collected and translated from the Latin," was edited by Mr. Pears in 1845. Fulke Greville's Biography of Sidney has been characterized in our memoir of its writer. Zouch's Memoirs of Sidney appeared in 1808; but the best biography of him, and one of which we have freely availed ourselves, is A Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, by H. R. Fox Bourne; London, 1862.—F. E. 