SIDNEY, Sir PHILIP, the son of sir Henry Sidney, and Mary, sister to Robert Dud ley, the favorite of queen Elizabeth, was b. at Penshnrst, in Kent, on Nov. 29, 1554. "%Then 10 years old, he was sent to school at Shrewsbury, whence, in 1569, lie went to Christ church, Oxford. From Oxford he passed to Cambridge, which he left with a high reputation for scholarship and general ability. In 1572, as the custom then was for young men of rank, be went abroad on his travels. Ile was in Paris when the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place, and narrowly escaped being one of its victims, Thereafter, he visited Belgium, Germany, Hungary, and Italy; and in 1575 he returned home, perfected in all manly accomplishments. his uncle, Dudley, earl of Leicester, was at this time in the zenith of his fortunes, and for Sidney a court career lay temptingly- open. As a courtier, his success was great; and with queen Elizabeth he became, and continued while he lived, a special favorite. In 1576, as a mark of her approval, he was sent on au embassy to the court of Vienna, from which he returned in the course of the year. following. Shortly after, lie had the boldness to address to the queen a " remonstrance" against her proposed marriage with Henry duke of Anjou, a union to which she seemed herself not indisposed. It is significant of the high favor in which he wns held by her, that Elizabeth, imperious as she was in temper, and little inclined to brook such interference, seems scarcely at all to have in Bill instance resented it. About this time, a quarrel with the earl of Oxford led to Sidney's temporary retirement from court, during which, at Wilton, the seat of his brothei-in law, the earl of Pembroke, he wrote his celebrated Arcadia. In 1583 he consoled lion self for the marriage of lady Penelope Devereux, to whom he had been ardently attached, and'who figures as the Stella of his poems, by himself marrying Frances, the daughter of sir Francis Walsingham. By this lady he had one daughter, who survived him. In the spring of 1585 he is said to have meditated sailing with sir Francis Drake in an expedition against the Spaniards in the West Indies, but to have been expressly forbidden by Elizabeth, on a ground of anxiety " lest she should lose the jewel of her dominions." It does not seem nicely consistent with this pretty story, that later in the seine year she appointed him governor of Flushing, whither he went to take part in t'-'e war then being waged between her allies, the Hollanders, and the Spanish. As it proved, she thus sent him to his death. At the battle of Zutphen, in Gelderland, after behaving with conspicuous gallantry, and having a horse killed under him, he received a musket-shot in the thigh. and after lingering for some days in great suffering, he died
at Arnheim on Oct. 7, 1586, in the 33d year of his age. A beautiful trait of humenity is recorded of him as he was being borne wounded from the field. Ile complained griev ously of thirst, and a bottle of water was procured for him, from which; s he was about to drink, he, was touched by the wistful look up at it of a mortally wounded soldier, who lay close by, and taking it untested from his lips, he handed it to his fellow in need, with the words: "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." The estimation in which Sidney was held by his countrymen was shown in the passion of grief with which the news of his death was received. His body was brought to -England, and afterlying for some time in state, was buried with great solemnity in the old cathedral of St. Paul's, a general mourning on the occasion being observed throughout the country. The universities issued three volumes of elegies/on his death, and Spenser, in his Astrophel, mourned for the loss of one who as a friend had been dear to him.
The love and admiration which Sidney won from his contemporaries was mainly a tribute ter the singular beauty of his character. Ills short life was illustrated by no brilliant achievement ; and his literary genius, though true and exquisite in its kind, weuld seareely.of itself have sufficed to account for the fervor of regard he inspired. But the purity and nobility of his nature, and the winning courtesies in which its gentle maguaniinity expressed itself, took captive all hearts while he lived, rind have since kept meet his memory. "Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot," lie lives in the history of his country as a rare and finished type of English character, in which the antique borer oft hivalry is seen shading into the graces of the modern gentleman. . overrun as it is with the fantastic affectations of the time, may still be rec ognized hv the reed( r who has patience to peruse it, as a work of indisputable genius, flushed with the lights of a fine imagination, and in its purity and tenderness of sen timent, giving an authentic reflex of the lovely moral nature of the writer. Ills other chief work, the Defense of Pneeie, published in 1595, after all that has since been written in the way of philosophical exposition on this and cognate subjects, will even now be found to repay the attention of the reader. Many of his shorter poems, more espe cially some of his sonnets, are, also of rare merit. See Fulke Greville's biography of Sidney, Zonch's memoirs of Sidney (1208), and II. 11. Fox Bourne's Memoirs of Pldkp Sidney (1862).