Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learn'd, and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."


Sidney's sister became Pembroke's mother in 1580, while her brother
Philip was staying with her at Wilton. He had early in the year
written a long argument to the Queen against the project of her
marriage with the Duke of Anjou, which she then found it politic to
seem to favour. She liked Sidney well, but resented, or appeared to
resent, his intrusion of advice; he also was discontented with what
seemed to be her policy, and he withdrew from Court for a time.
That time of seclusion, after the end of March, 1580, he spent with
his sister at Wilton. They versified psalms together; and he began
to write for her amusement when she had her baby first upon her
hands, his romance of "Arcadia." It was never finished. Much was
written at Wilton in the summer of 1580, the rest in 1581, written,
as he said in a letter to her, "only for you, only to you . . . for
severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, triflingly handled.
Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose
sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets
sent unto you as fast as they were done." He never meant that it
should be published; indeed, when dying he asked that it should be
destroyed; but it belonged to a sister who prized the lightest word
of his, and after his death it was published in 1590 as "The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia."

The book reprinted in this volume was written in 1581, while sheets
of the "Arcadia" were still being sent to Wilton. But it differs
wholly in style from the "Arcadia." Sidney's "Arcadia" has literary