It is impossible not to contemplate with affection so radiant a figure,
shining through the cold mists of that Zeeland winter, and that distant
and disastrous epoch. There is hardly a character in history upon which
the imagination can dwell with more unalloyed delight. Not in romantic
fiction was there ever created a more attractive incarnation of martial
valour, poetic genius, and purity of heart. If the mocking spirit of the
soldier of Lepanto could "smile chivalry away," the name alone of his
English contemporary is potent enough to conjure it back again, so long
as humanity is alive to the nobler impulses.

"I cannot pass him over in silence," says a dusty chronicler, "that
glorious star, that lively pattern of virtue, and the lovely joy of all
the learned sort. It was God's will that he should be born into the
world, even to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtue." The
descendant of an ancient Norman race, and allied to many of the proudest
nobles in England, Sidney himself was but a commoner, a private
individual, a soldier of fortune. He was now in his thirty second year,
and should have been foremost among the states men of Elizabeth, had it
not been, according to Lord Bacon, a maxim of the Cecils, that "able men
should be by design and of purpose suppressed." Whatever of truth there
may have been in the bitter remark, it is certainly strange that a man so
gifted as Sidney--of whom his father-in-law Walsingham had declared, that
"although he had influence in all countries, and a hand upon all affairs,
his Philip did far overshoot him with his own bow"--should have passed so
much of his life in retirement, or in comparatively insignificant
employments. The Queen, as he himself observed, was most apt to
interpret everything to his disadvantage. Among those who knew him well,
there seems never to have been a dissenting voice. His father, Sir Henry
Sidney, lord-deputy of Ireland, and president of Wales, a states man of