that we cast about, and new charged all our ordinance, and came upon them againe, willing them to yeeld, or els we would sinke them: wherupon the one would have yeelded, which was shot betweene winde and water; but the other called him traitor. Unto whom we made answere, that if he would not yeeld presently also, we would sinke him first. And thereupon he understanding our determination, presently put out a white flag, and yeelded, and yet refused to strike their own sailes, for that they were sworne never to strike to any Englishman. We then commanded their captaines and masters to come aboord us; which they did. And after examination & stowing them, we sent certaine of our owne men aboord them, and strook their sailes, and manned their ships: finding in them both 126 persons living, & 8 dead, besides those which they themselves had cast overboord. So it pleased God to give us the victory being but 42 men and a boy, whereof 2 were killed and 3 wounded: for the which good successe we give God the only praise. These two rich prizes laden with 1400 chests of quicksilver with the armes of Castile and Leon fastened upon them, and with a great quantity of bulles or indulgences, and guilded Missals or Service books, with an hundred tunnes of excellent wines, we brought shortly after into the river of Thames up to Blacke-wall. The Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles. The sonnet is a species of lyrical poetry which the world owes to the instinct of the Italians for delicate and harmonious form. The word sonnetto gives the effect of the recurring sound of a little peal of bells, skilfully rung once to attract attention or commemorate a passing event. That the sonnet was originally an adaptation from some Provençal lyrical sequence is not doubted, but the whole essence of its merit is its conciseness and rotundity, and its escape from the loose Provençal prodigality of rhyming. The sonnet must have fourteen lines, and an exact sonnet must have five rhymes arranged according to a very precise fashion (abba abba cde cde). This precision was not known to the earliest Italian sonneteers, who, however, never varied the number of lines, and never closed with a couplet. The oldest sonnet extant is believed to be one of considerable irregularity of form, written about 1220 by Piero delle Vigne. In the next generation Guittone di Arezzo, a poet of more industry than genius, gave his attention and its final form to the sonnet. Folgore de San Geminiano, a precursor of Dante, was the first, it appears, to produce a 'cycle' of sonnets-that is, a set of consecutive pieces dealing progressively with a definite theme. The sonnet, having thus made Italy its home, flourished there, almost unintermittently, for the next five centuries, until it became as easy for an educated Roman or Neapolitan to write a sonnet as to sign his name. Petrarch was the model of excellence to all these generations of poets, and it is to be noted that when the renaissance was complete, and so many of the mediæval forms of literature were done away with, the sonnet was retained out of respect for the humanism of Petrarch. We have drawn attention on page 159 to the sonnets published in the collection which came to be known as 'Tottel's Miscellany' in 1557in which Wyatt's and Surrey's paraphrases from Petrarch introduced the sonnet to English literature The word 'sonnet,' however, was misunderstood and was used for the next forty years or so, as it still is by uneducated people, to mean any lyrical poem or ballad. The French had by this time introduced several irregularities into the arrangement of the rhymes, and had invented the word 'quatorzain' to describe a poem in fourteen lines of rhymed verse, not necessarily a sonnet. We find this useful word introduced into English as early as 1582, and it is perhaps worth pointing out that the thousands of Elizabethan poems called 'sonnets are in their vast majority merely quatorzains, and not real sonnets at all. Drayton was so conscious of this that he called his cycle of 1594 Amours in Quatorzains. That the Elizabethans were slow to comprehend the real essence of the sonnet is shown by the fact that the work which more than any other served to popularise the form in England, the Hecatompathia of Watson (1582), is composed in a form of eighteen, instead of fourteen, lines. The fourteen-line limit, however, had been properly laid down in 1575 by Gascoigne, who, unfortunately, prescribes 'cross metre and the last two rhyming together,' heresies unknown to the Continental poets. Such rules did not affect Sir Philip Sidney, who is to be taken as the real introducer of the Petrarchan sonnet into English As Mr Lee has said, the publication of his Astrophe and Stella gave the sonnet in England ‘a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since.' Sidney was the scholar of Petrarch in this matter; but he had a closer and more familiar relation with his own French contemporaries, especially Ronsard and Du Bellay. It has recently been put forward that Sidney owed much as a sonneteer to Desportes; but dates make this improbable. As a matter of fact, Sidney died but a few months after Ronsard : he is affiliated as sonneteer to the original cenacle of the Pléiade. His sonnets were probably composed about the year 1580; they were posthumously published in 1591, and immediately set the fashion for cycles of sonnets. Mr Sidney Lee, in an appendix to his learned Life of William Shakespeare, has analysed the output of sonnets in England between 1591 and 1597. The result is surprising; he estimates that during that time far more than two thousand sonnets of various kindsamatory, congratulatory, philosophical, or religious -were actually published in this country. These post-Sidneian 'sonnets' were, almost without exception, quatorzains closing in a couplet. The influence of Desportes, if we cannot detect it in Sidney, is obvious in these later Elizabethans In 1592 came the first flight of English sonnetsequences, with Constable's Diana and Daniel's Delia, both of them dipped in the conventional sweetness of Desportes. In 1593 the cycles of sonnets were like flights of locusts, with Barnes, Constable, Lok, Giles Fletcher (the elder), Watson, and Lodge, whose Phillis contains some very musical, experimental measures. Among the publications of 1594 deserve mention Drayton's Idea, Percy's Calia, a curious anonymous volume entitled Zephyria, Chapman's Coronet, and Barnfield's Italianated perversity called The Affectionate Shepherd. The year 1595 was made illustrious in the sonnet world by Spenser's series of eighty-eight Amoretti; 1596 produced Griffin's Fidessa, Linche's Diella, Barnes's Divine Century, and the Chloris of William Smith. This was the culminating year of the Elizabethan sonnet, and after this the fashion began rapidly to fade away. It is to be noted that several collections of sonnets probably belong to this short period of six years (1591-97), although they were not then published. Shakespeare's Sonnets is by far the most illustrious example of this temporary suppression; but with it must be compared, and to the same period attributed, the Calica of Lord Brooke, the Aurora of Sir William Alexander (the Earl of Stirling), the love-sonnets of Campion, and a comic cycle of Gulling Sonnets by Sir John Davies. The sonnet continued to be cultivated more fitfully after the Elizabethan age was over. John Davies of Hereford and William Browne were less successful than Drummond of Hawthornden, who went back to the rigorous Petrarchan model with considerable adroitness. Donne composed two cycles of Holy Sonnets and La Corona, which were not published until a generation later. After this the form fell into a disrepute from which it did not recover until, in Milton's hands, 'the thing became a trumpet.' It is not to be supposed that this extraordinary manufacture of short poems, all made after the same pattern, could display much individual originality. The sonnets of Shakespeare-puzzling as they are, and formed to mystify the commentator -are at least of a most thrilling sincerity, and are inspired by an original exercise of high imagination; but if from Shakespeare to Sidney and Spenser, as sonneteers, the descent is considerable, from these latter to the general herd of cyclewriters it is immense. In the average Elizabethan sonnet we find some picturesqueness of diction, much sweetness, a tiresome abuse of pedantry, an elegance which has something affected about it, a passion so covered up with the ashes of an alembicated preciosity that it is often doubtful whether it burns at all. The monotony of the Elizabethan sonnets, their vague allusiveness, the instability and dimness of the images they evoke, do much to lessen our pleasure in reading them. Yet it must not be forgotten that, even if Sidney, Shakespeare, and Spenser were removed, there would be left a body of graceful, melodious poetry, all of which helped to give distinction to average poetic style in England, and some of which possessed positive merit of a high lyrical order. EDMUND GOSSE. Sir Philip Sidney seemed destined to take a very prominent part in the evolution of English poetry. In considering his work in verse, we have to recollect that at the age which Sidney had attained when he fell beneath the walls of Zutphen, Spenser had published nothing but The Shepherd's Calendar, and Shakespeare was principally known as the author of Venus and Adonis. Sidney was no less painfully working out his way through linguistic and traditional difficulties towards the open light of a perfect style; but the poisoned bullet cut short his chances of achieving a Faerie Queene or a Hamlet. When critics speak of the coldness' and 'affectation' of Sidney's poetry, they are forgetting the conditions under which he laboured, and are neglecting the evidence that he was rapidly surmounting those conditions. Perhaps, if the truth were known, Philip Sidney was one of the most notable 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown' the world has ever seen. He studied the art of poetry so closelyhe had such an expanding and mounting sense of its capacity-he was learning so to 'look into his heart, and write,' that everything seemed to point to his becoming one of the great English poets. That he never became; but the charm, the romantic pathos, of the imperfect verses he did write is perennial. Sidney began to study verse at a time when the particular kind of poetry he enjoyed among the Italians and the Spaniards was unknown in England. He conceived a British variety of Petrarchan art, a species of lyrical songs and sonnets, which 'might be employed, and with how heavenly fruit, both private and public, in singing the praises of the Immortal Beauty.' But in doing so he was aware of the necessity of avoiding the insipidity and insincerity which had fallen upon such poetry on the continent of Europe-the vain repetitions, the languid conceits, the preposterous frozen compliments. In opening a new literature he desired to avoid falling immediately into the errors of an old, and indeed exhausted, literature, like that of Italy. Hence Sidney starts with a divided aim; he wishes to introduce the psychology of love, with its delicacies and its refined analysis of emotion, into the rough and awkward English tongue, but at the same time he wishes to escape the pitfalls into which those descend who 'poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes with new-born sighs and denizen'd wit do sing.' The early numbers in the Astrophel and Stella show us the adventures of Sidney's spirit when this design of regenerating English lyrical poetry first occurred to him. He studied 'fine inventions' and Continental models, 'oft turning others' leaves.' He tried hard to reproduce his emotions, but the effect merely depressed him; he was conscious that what he composed was harsh and pedantic, and that his speech bore no relation to his glow of inward feeling. The words came forth halting, and he became aware that study was driving away invention. Then it was that, 'great with child to speak, and helpless in his throes,' Sidney was biting his pen and beating his bosom, when ""Fool!"" said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.' Accordingly, look in his heart he did; but to eyes unaccustomed to the blaze of nature the white light of the heart at first only blinds and bewilders. Hence, in the poetry which Sidney began to write about 1575 and onwards (for to this date we may, perhaps, attribute his determination to reform poetry in England) we find at first much that seems to us dry and displeasing, much empty fluency, much flatness, and even some insipidity. But Sidney advances in skill; he gains more and more command over the medium; and before the Astrophel and Stella is finished, we find that the young poet has secured the power of copying for mankind the emotional language which a living passion has written on his heart. Hence the careful reader of Sidney's sonnets, who has at first found them a little colourless and dim after the far richer poetry of the succeeding generation, learns to appreciate in them that very quality which the eighteenth, and until lately even the nineteenth, centuries were unable to detect in them, their rigorous sincerity. When once the author has surmounted the difficulty of speaking in verse, of using the language of literature-as soon as he has gained confidence in his own observation and in his own judgment of values-he sings 'with his eye upon the object;' so that, although a species of archaism makes the Astrophel and Stella seem old-fashioned among the Elizabethan sonnetcycles, it will yet be found to be more interesting, because more sincere, varied, and circumstantial, than any of its successors, except that of Shakespeare. All the time that he was writing so earnestly, an invincible modesty kept Sidney in the background of the poets-'Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit,' he calls himself. But this simplicity gave him a realistic vitality. His genius was planted firmly on experience. The highway, along which his horse's feet went trampling, was his Parnassus. His sheep were thoughts, which he pastured, far from the haunts of men, on the 'fair hills of fruitless love.' Other men might be 'victors still of Phoebus golden treasure.' Το Sidney poetry was never the main object of life, never life itself; but he adorned the paths of love, war, patriotism, religion, all that led through the wide fields of his beautiful, practical chivalry, with the roses and lilies of fragrant, flowery verse. As a consequence of his not 'taking himself seriously' as a poet, when once his verse was written he ceased to care what became of it, and it might very easily have entirely disappeared. It is probably to the piety of his admirable sister, the Countess of Pembroke, who had the courage to ignore her brother's dying command that the MS. of his Arcadia should be destroyed, that we owe the preservation of Sidney's prose and verse. He published nothing in his lifetime; three editions of Astrophel an Stella belong to 1591, and his miscellaneous poems were added to the third edition (1598) of the Arcadia. Some sonnets appeared for the first time with Constable's poems, in 1594. A great mass of rather interesting verse, probably belong. ing to Sidney's early and unemancipated years,>> embedded in the Arcadia itself (1590); so that the effect which was made on the public by the poetry of Sidney did not belong to the period of his career, but was wholly posthumous, and was postponed to the last decade of the sixteenth century. With so extreme a rapidity was literature then developing, that in 1595 poetry of the most startling originality written in 1575, even by Spenser and Sidney, wore a faded air; as a consequence of this the influence of Sidney, which was for a few years immense, soon passed away, and did not, in fact, survive the death of Queen Elizabeth. EDMUND GOSSE. Sidney was born, 30th November 1554, at Penshurst, in Kent, son of Sir Henry Sidney (who usually spelt the name Sydney, while his son preferred Sidney or Sidnei). Philip studied at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, and after spending nearly three years on the Continent returned to England. an accomplished writer, in 1575, and was introduced to the court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. He was present at the famous reception given by Leicester to the queen at Kenilworth in the summer of that year. At first a favourite of the queen, he was sent in 1577 on missions to the Elector Palatine, the Emperor Rudolf, and the Prince of Orange. Elizabeth was ungrateful towards his father for his exertions as Lord Deputy in Ireland, and Philip wrote in his defence; he also addressed the queen against her projected match with the Duke of Anjou. Elizabeth frowned on him; and his mother's brother, the once powerful Leicester, fell into disfavour. Sidney retired (1580) to his sister Mary, now Lady Pembroke, at Wilton, where, probably, most of his Arcadia was written. In 1583 he was knighted, and married Frances, daughter of Sir F. Walsingham. His arrangement (1585) to accompany Drake on one of his buccaneer expeditions was defeated by Elizabeth's caprice and Drake's treachery. Sidney was ordered to accompany Leicester, chosen by the queen to carry her half-hearted support to the Netherlanders in their struggle against Spain. After one small brilliant exploit, he received, on 2nd October 1586, his death-wound under the walls of Zutphen-where five hundred and fifty Englishmen made a gallant but ill-judged attack on nearly three thousand Spaniards—and died on the 17th. His work in literature may be placed between 1578 and 1582. Widely celebrated as it was in his lifetime, nothing was published till after his death His brilliant character, his connections, his generous patronage of men of letters, with the report of those on episodes in it. The eighteenth century, on the whole, reversed the verdict of that of the sixteenth and seventeenth, though Richardson borrowed his heroine Pamela from it, and Cowper unfeignedly admired it, calling its author'a warbler of poetic prose.' Horace Walpole called it a 'tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through;' Hazlitt was hardly more favourable, and Hallam's praise is faint. Now, unquestionably, its interest is mainly historical, though much of it is fine. Drayton commended Sidney for having checked Euphuism and improved English style; he says he Thoroughly paced our language as to show author's wide range of reading is displayed. Sidney criticises severely the crowd of contemporary versifiers not peculiar to that age! - to whose want of power, bad taste, and trivial style he partly ascribes the then existing low estimate of poetry. And here names the he best English poets known to him : Chaucer, Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser's just (anonymously) published Calendar. 'Besides these, I do not remember to have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed, that have poetical sinews in them.' English drama, it will be remembered, was then in its cradle. In 1580 Ralph Roister Doister, Gorboduc, and Gammer Gurton were practically all the drama here to show; and Sidney could not foresee that his own contemporaries were just about to recreate the art. His criticism of the contemporary English stage was severe trained to Italian and pseudo-classical canons, he demanded the complete separation of tragedy and comedy, and the adhesion to Senecan models. Even Gorboduc, which might have been 'an exact model of all tragedies,' is 'very defectuous in the circumstances.' The next ten years saw Greene, Peele, Marlowe, and Shakespeare all busily at work. In 1575 Sidney had met Penelope Devereux (1560-1607), daughter of the first Earl of Essex; but it was only in 1581, the year following her marriage to the Puritan Lord Rich, who afterwards divorced her, that Sidney awoke too late to love for her. The one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs of Astrophel and Stella (1591) offer a marvellous picture of passionate love. In 1583 he was knighted, and married Walsingham's young daughter, Frances. Sidney also translated the Psalms. He was among the first to recognise Spenser's promise; he knew Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Bacon, and Raleigh; and he accepted dedications from Giordano Bruno. Sidney's impetuosity of temper is seen in much of his writing, as in his reply to Leicester's Commonwealth, an attack on the Earl, his uncle: declaring to the attacker, ‘thou therein liest in thy throat, which I will be ready to justify upon thee in any place in Europe.' The same trait appears in the following letter-containing what proved to be a groundless accusation-which he addressed in 1578 to Edward Molyneux, his father's secretary and (ultimately, at least) his own valued friend : MR MOLYNEUX-Few words are best. My letters to my father have come to the eyes of some. Neither can I condemn any but you for it. If it be so, you have played the very knave with me; and so I will make you know, if I have good proof of it. But that for so much as is past. For that is to come, I assure you before God, that if ever I know you do so much as read any letter I write to my father, without his commandment, or my consent, I will thrust my dagger into you. And trust to it, for I speak it in earnest. In the meantime, farewell. Of the following extracts, four are from Sidney's Arcadia, and the fifth from his Defence of Poesie: The Arcadia professes to deal with love and adventures in the Greek province which, actually famed for its pure air and its people and the purity and simplicity of their lives, the Roman poets had idealised into a kind of pastoral and romantic Utopia. This is the opening : It was in the time that the earth begins to put her new aparrel against the approch of her lover, and that the Sun running a most even course becomes an indifferent arbiter betwene the night and the day: when the hopeless shepheard Strephon was come to the scendes which lie against the island of Cithera: where viewing the place with a heavy kinde of delight and sometimes casting his eyes to the Ileward, he called his friendly rivall the pastor Claius unto him; setting first downe in his darkened countenance a dolefull copie of what he would speake, and with a long speech on his absent love, during which they see a shipwrecked man, Musidorus, washed ashore. Him they offer to conduct back with them to their home in Arcadia, and to present to the hospitable gentleman Kalander. In Arcadia. The 3. day after in the time that the morning did throw roses and violets in the heavenly floore against the comming of the Sun (the nightingales striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorow) and made them part of their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which that night had bin their pavilion) they went on their jorney which by and by welcomed Musidorus eyes, wearied with the wasted soile of Laconia, with delightfull prospects. There were hilles which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleis, whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; medows, enameld with al sorts of ey-pleasing floures; thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to by the chereful deposition of many wel-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security; while the prety lambs with bleting oratory craved the dams comfort; here a shepheards boy piping, as though he should never be old; there a yong shepherdesse knitting, and withall singing; and it seeme! that her voice comforted. her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voices music. (Book L. chap. 2) A Stag Hunt. Then went they together abroad, the good Kalander entertaining them with pleasaunt discoursing-howe well he loved the sporte of hunting when he was a young man, how much in the comparison thereof he disdained all chamber delights, that the sunne (how great a jonie soever he had to make) could never prevent him with earlines, nor the moone (with her sober countenance) div swade him from watching till midnight for the decres feeding. O, saide he, you will never live to my age, without you kepe your selves in breath with exercise, and in hart with joyfullnes; too much thinking doth consume the spirits; and oft it falles out, that, while one thinkes too much of his doing, he leaves to doe the effect of his thinking. Then spared he not to remember, how much Arcadia was chaunged since his youth; activitie and good felowship being nothing in the price it was then held in; but according to the nature of the old-growing world, still worse and worse. Then would he tell them stories of such gallaunts as he had knowen; and so with pleasant company beguiled the times hast, and shortned the wayes length, till they came to the side of the wood, where the houndes were in couples, staying their com ming, but with a whining accent craving libertie; maay of them in colour and marks so resembling, that it shewed they were of one kinde. The huntsmen handsomely attired in their greene liveries, as though they were chil dren of Sommer, with staves in their hands to beat the guiltlesse earth, when the houndes were at a fault; and with hornes about their neckes, to sound an alarum upon a sillie fugitive: the houndes were straight uncoupled, and ere long the Stagge thought it better to trust the nimblenes of his feet then to the slender fortification of his lodging; but even his feete betrayed him; for, howsoever they went, they themselves uttered themselves to the scent of their enimies; who, one taking it of an other, and sometimes beleeving the windes advertisement, sometimes the view of their faithful councellors the huntsmen, with open mouthes then denounced warre, when the warre was alreadie begun. Their crie being composed of so well sorted mouthes, that any man would perceive therein some kind of proportion, but the skilful woodmen did find a musick. Then delight and varietie of opinion drew the horsemen sundrie wayes, yet cheering their houndes with voyce and horn, kept still as it were together. The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens, dispersing their noise through all his quarters; and even the nimph Echo left to bewayle the losse of Narcissus, and became a hunter. But the Stagge was in the end so hotly pursued, that (leaving his flight) he was driven to make courage of despaire; and so turning his head, made the hounds with |