Hath changed his soul and made his object you;
Where finding so much beauty met with virtue,
He hath not only gain'd himself his eyes,

But in your love made all his servants wise.'

In the January of the same year, he received from her Majesty the honour of knighthood; an honour which, like all others, "she bestowed with frugality and choice." He was nominated, likewise, to carry Elizabeth's condolences to the French court on the death of the Duke of Anjou, brother to Henry III.; but it does not appear, that this delegation was carried into effect.

In 1584, Dr. David Powel, in a manly, sensible, and pious strain of dedication, inscribed to him his History of Wales.'

At this juncture several plots against the Queen's person, both at home and abroad, having given her great and just alarm, an association was instituted under the Earl of Leicester, by which men of all degrees and conditions bound themselves under the most solemn obligations to prosecute, even to death, whoever should attempt any thing against their Sovereign. These efforts having exposed that prominent nobleman to many severe aspersions, particularly in a malignant and scurrilous work generally entitled Leicester's Commonwealth,'* Sir Philip

* Of this work, which taxed Leicester with ambition, arrogance, and treachery in their most criminal degree, the reputed author was the rough and turbulent Robert Parsons, a jesuit: but he is said to have disowned it, though some critics have pronounced the composition worthy of a Tacitus. It was first published abroad in 1584, under the title of A Dialogue between a Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Lawyer;' and, from the colour of it's leaves, it was occasionally denominated, "Father

took up his pen to vindicate his uncle's reputation. In this, however, he did not fully succeed; having confined his defence chiefly to an assertion of the high descent of the Dudleys, and to the detection of various inconsistencies in the hostile pamphlet; and, in the course of it, having degraded himself by an unworthy asperity of speech.

He now, disappointed probably in his views of domestic promotion, or looking forward (as some have, perhaps partially, suggested) to no less than the conquest of America, formed with Sir Fulke Greville a project of accompanying Sir Francis Drake, who had already traversed the globe, and filled (as it was supposed) both his royal mistress' coffers and his own by his fortunate piracies,* upon

Parsons' Green Coat." In the year following it was translated into French, and entitled, La Vie abominable, Ruses, Trahisons, Meurtres, Impostures, &c.' The answer to this libel, having remained in MS. above a hundred and fifty years (for it first appeared in the Sidney Papers,' edited in 1746) was probably regarded as an incomplete apology for the character so fiercely assailed in it. It contains a passage however, which demands to be extracted, as proving how much his own character had been influenced by the high spirit of ancestry, ascribed by Sir Fulke Greville to his mother: "I am a Dudley in blood, the Duke's daughter's son-my chiefest honour is, to be a Dudley." From her, likewise, he inherited much of that tender melancholy, which induced Languet to advise him to take care of his health.'

* Even Languet himself, and this renders Sidney's plan the more extraordinary, regarded Drake as no better than a pirate; and cautioned his friend against the auri sacra fames, the principal motive upon these occasions. This second voyage proved less productive. After nearly a twelvemonth's absence, and a loss of seven hundred and fifty men, the illustrious buccaneer brought back 60,000l., of which two-thirds being due to the

his second expedition: not however with so much secrecy, but that it reached the ear of the Queen, who issued her peremptory orders to restrain him from his purpose.

In 1585, the elective throne of Poland was vacated by the death of Stephen Bathori, one of it's best and wisest possessors. Upon this occasion, Sidney was named as one of the competitors. What an approach must that character have made to excellence, which could thus create a party among distant foreigners, uninfluenced by corruption, to offer a crown to an English knight! But his Sovereign, as Naunton informs us," refused to further his advancement, not only out of emulation, but out of fear to lose the jewel of her times;" or perhaps, as Fuller remarks, he himself declined the dignity, preferring rather to be a subject to Queen El'abeth, than a prince beyond the seas.

From two letters† sent to him, in 1583 and 1585, by Mornai du Plessis, through special envoys, upon the subject of the dangers and interests of the French Huguenots (assailed as they were by the

adventurers who fitted out the ships, the remainder allowed only to the surviving sailors about six-pence halfpenny each man: "so cheaply," observes one of Drake's biographers, "is life sometimes hazarded!”

"She committed Sir Matthew Arundel, of Wardour Castle in the West, for accepting from the German Cæsar the dignity of a Count, and denied Sir Philip Sidney the crown of Poland." (Osborne's Misc. Works.) "I will not allow," she used to say, "that my sheep shall be marked with a stranger's mark, nor that they follow the whistle of a foreign shepherd." (Wicquefort.)

These letters are preserved in the Memoires de Messires Philippes de Mornai.

Guise faction, at the head of the Holy League) it may be inferred how highly foreigners estimated his influence at the English court. The Queen not only expended considerable sums in levying a German force, which Condé and Casimir conducted into France, but also extended her protection of the Reformed Religion to the Netherlands, which had implored her succours against the bloody Duke of Alva. She declined, indeed, their proffered sovereignty; but she promised to send a considerable body of troops to their relief, for the support of which she received several towns as pledges. Of one of those cautionary fortresses, Flushing (from it's situation at the mouth of the Scheldt, deemed one of the most important) Sidney was appointed Governor; and soon afterward, upon the arrival of the Earl of Leicester in the United Provinces as General of the English auxiliaries, with an army of five thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry, he joined him as his General of the Horse.* In this

* One consequence of this foreign expedition, justly deplored by Camden, was "that the English, which of all the northern nations had been least drinkers and most commended for their sobriety, learned by these Netherland wars to drown themselves with immoderate drinking, and by drinking to others' healths to impair their own." Their previous temperance must in some measure have been the result of principle, if it be true (as Voltaire asserts) "que les nations septentrionales semblent aimer les liqueurs fortes, et lès vins, d'autant plus que la nature les leur a refusés." (Hist. de Charles XII.) In a commercial view, however-if, indeed, commerce may be named in comparison with morality-great advantages accrued to the nation from the influx of exiles, whom popish persecution drove from their industrious homes. With the fugitives of Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, and more especially Antwerp, the decayed streets of

capacity, however, he soon found it to be his duty to remonstrate with his uncle upon his ill usage of the soldiery in various particulars. Neither was the Queen herself, it appears, better satisfied with the behaviour of one, whom (as she boasted) she had raised out of the dust,' and whom she subsequently suspected of aspiring to the perpetual dictatorship of the provinces in question.

In July 1586, in concert with his young friend the Stadtholder Maurice, Sir Philip, after a pious address to his soldiers, and an injunction of the ancient system of silence during their march, took Axell (a town in Flanders) by a night-scalade, without the loss of a single man; and liberally rewarded his brave followers, "every one of them according to his merit, out of his own private fortune." A thaw, however, frustrated his attempt upon Steenburg; and Graveling was snatched from his grasp by treachery: La Motte, the governor of the town, having offered to surrender it into his hands, only with a view of entrapping those who should be sent to take possession of it.

In the course of this year died Sir Henry Sidney, after having presided over the principality of Wales twenty-six years: and Lady Mary survived her husband only three months. Their gallant son was not permitted long to deplore his loss. A detachment of the English army accidentally meeting a convoy be

Canterbury, Norwich, and many other towns were peopled and made to flourish. In the following century, similar consequences ensued in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantz, which brought over to England many thousands of the best manufacturers of France.