it is certainly an art, of which Sir Philip Sidney was master in a very high degree. No writer surpasses him in exciting commiseration and pity, no one lords over the human heart with more powerful and resistless domination. So far, indeed, from being a tiresome story, it would be difficult, in the whole range of fiction, to mention one which more completely grapples with the feelings, and retains the attention of the reader. We do not say, that it is impossible for any one to desist in the perusal of the work till he has arrived at the conclusion; but we do say, that he, who in reading it can close its pages without a wish to open them again, has as little in him of laudable feeling as of genuine taste.

In the creations of intellectual beauty, no writer is more successful than Sir Philip Sidney. His heroes are all cast in the mould of perfection, the repositaries of "high-erected thoughts, seated in a heart of courtesie," the souls of gallant constancy and spotless honour. Though different, they are but the different modifications of human excellence, of mental and incorporeal loftiness, breathing itself into, as it were, and giving a transfused beauty to the person. In his characters, the roughness of superiority is melted almost to feminine softness, yet without losing, as it acquires more of loveliness and attraction, any of its high and exalted appendages. There is a repose and relief about his personages, which, while it dims nothing of their brightness, makes them sweet resting places for the mind to fasten on. The character of a hero, Sir Philip Sidney always described con amore-it was his own proper and natural character; and to delineate it, he had only to transcribe the workings of his own mind, and to give expression to its romantic emotions. His heroines are not less faultlessly designed; they are, in truth, the beaming personifications of virtue, with all the chaste effulgence of heaven-derived and heaven-directed purity-such fair creations of loveliness as the minds of fancy's dreamers love to picture. They are, indeed,

"The darling daughters of the day,

And bodied in their native ray."

Romance, notwithstanding all its tissue of extravagancies, has much to gratify the human mind; and as the gratifications which it administers have a tendency to dignify and refine the grossness of worldly selfishness, they are not without their attendant benefit. There is a mixture of dauntless courage and submissive humility, of sternness to man and devotedness to woman, of fierceness in the fight and meekness in the wooing, about its doughty heroes, which interests us by its blended variety and the entireness of its united emotions. There are, also, the universal accompaniments of bodily might and intellectual

elevation, and these are no small attractions. The pride, the haughtiness of man, delights to see his species exalted. Like Prometheus, he would rob the heaven of its fire to illumine the habitations of the earth.-His fancy loves to pour itself forth in the formation of creatures of etherial and impassable brightness, and to ennoble himself, as it were, by his kindred to the beings of his own creation. Who can observe, without a secret complacency and satisfaction, the characters of the heroes and knights of romance, their resistless prowess, their patience, their constancy, their fidelity, and their love. We see them going forth with all that can excite or challenge admiration-beauty glowing in their form-strength residing in their right hand, and mightiness and magnanimity encircling them with an immortal radiance. We see them now wielding the sword, which never waves but to conquer, in the defence of the captive or oppressed; subduing armies and armaments by the force of their own arm, and casting from them, as with abhorrence, all weakness, pusillanimity, and fear; braving death with an obstinacy he seems to shrink from, and enduring more than earthly perils with more than earthly fortitude. We see them, now kneeling with submissive devotedness before their hard-hearted mistresses, treating them with an almost idolatrous humility of devotion, and trembling beneath their frowns, as if a glance of their eye could cause annihilation. We see them again, refreshing and recruiting themselves in the depth of some untrodden forest or shady grove, or reposing in security under the open canopy of heaven, again to rise to the performance of fresh exploits of valour and achievements of hardihood.

Equally successful is our author in picturing the soft and gentle emotions of love and friendship; in describing those scenes where the heart pours itself forth in the bosom of some sympathetic listener, or those quarrels and reconciliations which only for awhile stop the pulse of affection to make it return again more violently to its accustomed beating. Of this, the dialogues between Pyrocles and Musidorus in the first book, and between Pyrocles and Philoclea in the fourth, are delightful examples. Sir Philip Sidney's fairy pencil was principally formed to delineate the pensive and milder workings of feeling. His transparent mirror reflected the emotions of the human mind; but it was not the mind awakened by crime and exasperated by scorn; it was not the mind preyed upon by remorse or tormentors generated within itself. His province was not to pourtray the dark and horrible in nature, or the dark and horrible in man. His was not the gloomy colouring of Dante or Salvator Rosa. His abode was not on the precipice or the mountain, on the eyrie of the eagle or the birth-place of the

storm, but in the bosoms of soft and etherial moulding, in hearts of loved and loving tenderness, in groves of silent and sacred quiet, and in plains illumined by perpetual spring.

His descriptions of nature and her scenery are universally delightful and sweet. There is an air of freshness and verdure about them, which we look for in vain in other writers. In reading them, it seems as if the breathing zephyr which hovers over scenes of such enchantment and beauty, had found a voice, and is painting to us the delights of its favourite and haunted groves. We feel them as the transfusion into language of nature's universal voice, as it issues forth in the warbling of the birds, the whispers of the forest, and the murmurs of the streams. They sooth us as the sound of a distant waterfall, or, as "a gentle south-west wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters." Nature's enthusiastic follower, Sir Philip Sidney worshipped with awe the print of her footsteps: his genius, camelion-like, received a fresh hue from every fresh variety with which she supplied him, and her beauties had always the power of producing from him strains not less sympathetic and delightful than the music elicited by the beams of the morning from the magic statue of Memnon.

The feeling which the perusal of the Arcadia excites, is a calm and pensive pleasure, at once full, tranquil, and exquisite. The satisfaction we experience is not unsimilar to that of meditation by moonlight, when the burning fervor of the day has subsided, and every thing which might confuse or disorder our contemplation is at rest. All is peaceful and quiet, and clear as a transparency. The silvery glittering of the language, the unearthly loftiness of its heroes, the etheriality of their aspirations, and the sweet tones of genuine and unstudied feeling which it sounds forth, all combine to embue our souls with a soft and pleasing melancholy. We feel ourselves under the spell of an enchanter, in the foils of a witchery, too gratifying to our senses to be willingly shaken off, and therefore resign ourselves without resistance to its influence. By it, we are removed to other and more delightful climes-by it, we are transported to the shady groves of Arcady and the bowery recesses of Tempe; to those heavenly retreats, where music and melody were wafted with every sighing of the breeze along their cool and translucid streams. We find ourselves in the midst of the golden age, with glimpses of the armed grandeur of the age of chivalry. We find ourselves in a period of conflicting sights and emotions, when all that was lovely in the primitive simplicity of the one, and all that was fascinating in the fantastic magnificence of the other, were united and mingled together; where the rustic festivity of the shepherd was succeeded by the imposing splendour

of the tournament, and the voice of the pastoral pipe and oaten reed was joined with the sound of the trumpet and the clashing of the lance.

It has been remarked, that the comic parts of the Arcadia, which relate to Dametas and his family, are amongst the worst parts of the book. This is in some measure true, and yet the dislike which we feel in reading them arises not so much out of their own inferiority, as from their unsuitableness and unfitness to form part of such a work. There is an incongruity in their association with the true and natural pictures of his genius, which cannot but excite our displeasure. Our feeling is the same as in seeing the ale-house paintings of Teniers by the Transfiguration of Raphaël. Besides this, we feel it a kind of debasement in the mind of Sir Philip Sidney, to descend from its native height and dignity to the low subjects of burlesque and humour. We feel that he was designed for other purposes than to make us laugh, and that such an attempt is little better than a prostitution of his powers. In so doing, he dissipates all the enchantment which rivetted us to him: he mortifies and wounds our sensibility, by destroying the train of feelings which before had possessed us: he weakens and diminishes our faith, by destroying our confidence and arousing our judgment: and when these great foundations are removed, when the heart is hardened to their illusions and the belief convinced of their fallacy, what have the fairy palaces of imagination, and the bright structures of fancy, to support them or to rest on?

We cannot close our article, without paying a tribute of respect to Sir Philip Sidney on the ground of his diction. Perhaps we may venture to pronounce him, notwithstanding his occasional blemishes, the best, the most happy, the most powerful prose writer of the time in which he flourished. Certain we are, that none of his contemporaries ever equalled him in his best specimens of composition, in his most finished and consummate productions. There is a certain point, indeed, beyond which language can go no farther; and which, whosoever has attained, has as little need to dread a rival, as to expect a superior; and that this point has been frequently reached by Sir Philip Sidney, no one, who has read his Arcadia, will doubt or deny. The period in which he wrote was one which presented peculiar advantages and disadvantages, it was one which afforded opportunities of advancing our language to unapproachable perfection, or lowering it to unparalleled degradation. No model being then established, our national dialect was at the mercy of every bold and piratical marauder, who might think fit to shape its form and marshal its riches; and it was left to the caprice or judgement of every writer, to introduce such new combinations or additions to its phraseology, as his own unbounded desire

might direct. That this excess of license should be attended with many of the perversions of bad taste, was easy to be imagined; but, at the same time, it was the cause and foun tain of many surpassing excellencies, such as could never have been produced under the withering power of constraint. The writers, indeed, of that age had almost a power, similar to Adam's, of giving names to all that lay before them in the animate or intellectual creation, and of suiting and modifying the energies of language to all the various operations of nature and exigencies of mind. Of a power so unlimited, great might have been the abuse, and great the contaminating influence over all our succeeding literature. This happily did not, or did but partially, take place; and while we find amongst the writers of that time innumerable pieces of exquisite composition, the instances of a contrary kind are very rare, and of those, the principal and efficient cause was the imitation of the bad models of other countries. The conceits and quaintnesses of Sir Philip Sidney's language had their origin from the Italian school; and, indeed, whatever was bad or unworthy of him in his writings was occasioned by imitation. When he gives free play to his own power of expression, he never disgusts or disappoints his readers. Then he delights us with passages of such unrivalled and inexpressible beauty, that all petty censures and preconceived disgusts are in a moment overwhelmed, and we are compelled to acknowledge him as a great and unequalled master of language, who had the power to modify and mould it to every degree of passion and thought, and unlock and open all its diversified resources and inexhaustible stores.

It would not, perhaps, be over-rating the merit of Sir Philip Sidney, or doing injustice to the memory of any of the writers of his time, to ascribe to him and his agency the formation of that peculiar and characteristic style, which pervades the English literature at the close of the sixteenth century, and which has so great a share in rendering the productions of our dramatic writers, of that period, of inestimable worth and value. We certainly do not know any other writer who has so fair a title to that distinction, from priority of date or superiority of desert. It would, indeed, be ridiculous to affirm, that a book of such celebrity, in its time, as the Arcadia, should be of inconsiderable weight in shaping the public taste, and giving a character and impression to our language. Every work, much read and much admired, must have an influence over its native literature, and, if it does not openly and immediately affect it, will, however, sooner or later insensibly deteriorate or improve it. This could not but be the case with Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and therefore we may regard the whole literary character of that age as, in some sort, derived and descended from him, and his work as