eighteen and Languet fifty-five, a French Huguenot, learned and
zealous for the Protestant cause, who had been Professor of Civil
Law in Padua, and who was acting as secret minister for the Elector
of Saxony when he first knew Sidney, and saw in him a future
statesman whose character and genius would give him weight in the
counsels of England, and make him a main hope of the Protestant
cause in Europe. Sidney travelled on with Hubert Languet from
Frankfort to Vienna, visited Hungary, then passed to Italy, making
for eight weeks Venice his head-quarters, and then giving six weeks
to Padua. He returned through Germany to England, and was in
attendance it the Court of Queen Elizabeth in July, 1575. Next
month his father was sent to Ireland as Lord Deputy, and Sidney
lived in London with his mother.

At this time the opposition of the Mayor and Corporation of the City
of London to the acting of plays by servants of Sidney's uncle, the
Earl of Leicester, who had obtained a patent for them, obliged the
actors to cease from hiring rooms or inn yards in the City, and
build themselves a house of their own a little way outside one of
the City gates, and wholly outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction.
Thus the first theatre came to be built in England in the year 1576.
Shakespeare was then but twelve years old, and it was ten years
later that he came to London.

In February, 1577, Philip Sidney, not yet twenty-three years old,
was sent on a formal embassy of congratulation to Rudolph II. upon
his becoming Emperor of Germany, but under the duties of the formal
embassy was the charge of watching for opportunities of helping
forward a Protestant League among the princes of Germany. On his
way home through the Netherlands he was to convey Queen Elizabeth's