Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/97

69 and various virtues which Camden had displayed at the other colleges.

Philip Sidney, "at whose great birth," according to Ben Jonson, "all the muses met," was the most distinguished, perhaps, of all the Sons of Christ Church. He entered in 1568. He was especially licensed to eat flesh during Lent, being somewhat subject to sickness, as we are told; and he made such great and brilliant progress in learning, between his fourteenth and his sixteenth years, that even his teachers "found something in him to observe and learn, above what they themselves usually read and taught. His talk, even as a youth, was ever of knowledge, and his very play tended to enrich his mind." One of his Tutors carried this admiration so far as to wish to have engraved upon his tombstone the great and important fact that he, the Tutor, had had Sidney for a pupil. Tutors rarely make such peculiarly marked antemortem requests, in our days; although there lived, not long ago, in a small town in Scotland, an humble Pedagogue, whose proud boast it was that he had taught the English alphabet to Andrew Lang!

The plague raging in Oxford in 1571, Sidney left the University hurriedly, never to return. He left his degree behind him, and he had no time, in later years, to go back to claim it.