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. longing to the enemy, an action ensued near Zutphen, of such sharpness, that it thenceforward (as we learn from Strada) became a proverb in the Belgian army. Sidney, having had one horse shot under him, instantly mounted a second; and seeing Lord Willoughby in imminent danger, hastened to his rescue. After this, he continued the fight with great spirit till "a musket-shot a little above his left knee so broke and rifled the bone, and so entered the thigh upward toward his body, as the bullet (which, it has been suggested, was a poisoned one) could not be found before the body was opened." In this agonised condition he returned to the camp, nearly a mile and a half distant, and was thence carried in a barge to Arnheim, a city in Guelderland. A more illustrious example of resignation, fortitude, and benevolence is not chronicled in the pages of history, than that which Sir Philip exhibited upon this occasion. On his way from the field, languid and thirsty with loss of blood, he asked for water: but, as he was lifting the goblet to his parched lips, he observed a dying soldier, whose ghastly countenance induced him immediately to renounce the indulgence, saying, "This man's necessity is still greater than mine."* surgeons likewise, who attended him, he admonished to" use their art with freedom, while his strength was yet entire, his body free from fear, and his mind The * Dr. Zouch in his Appendix, No. 5, for somewhat similar instances of self-denial refers the reader to 2 Sam. xxiii. 1417, or 1 Chron. x. 16-19., to Plutarch's Life of Alexander, where that prince is on his march against Darius after their last battle (IV. 307.), and to the Ninth Book of the Pharsalia, where the Romans, under the guidance of Cato, are traversing the sands of Lybia. He gives also a communication from Mr. Val. Green, upon West's celebrated picture on this subject. able to endure:" and he even composed an ode (un-. fortunately, not now extant) upon the nature of his wound, while he was writhing under it's effects;* and addressed a large epistle,' in elegant Latin, to Belearius, an eminent divine. At first, sanguine hopes of his recovery were encouraged, the rumour of which diffused universal joy in England. But they proved, unhappily, fallacious. From his lady, who had attended him into Zealand, he received every consolation, which the most tender sympathy could bestow: but by sixteen days of acute suffering" his very shoulder-bones were worn through his skin, with constant and obedient posturing of his body to the art of the chirurgeon;" and smelling (as he declared) the smell of death from incipient mortification, though yet unperceived by his attendants, the night before he died, leaning upon a pillow in his bed he addressed to Weierus, the celebrated physician of the Duke of Cleves and the pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, an anxious summons: Come, dear Weierus, come instantly: my life is in danger, and I long ardently for you. Dead or alive, I will not prove ungrateful. I cannot add any more; but I earnestly entreat you to make haste. Farewell.'+ He subsequently made a public confession of his faith to the clergy who surrounded his bed, and at his * Lord Vaux, also, wrote a sonnet when dying; and Edwards, a poet in the reign of Elizabeth, composed his Edwards' Soul's Knell' under similar circumstances. The 'Complaint of a Sinner,” adds Dr. Zouch, [made and] sung by the Earl of Essex upon his death-bed in Ireland, is printed in The Paradise of Dainty Devices.' † Mi Weiere, veni, veni: de vitâ periclitor, et te cupio. Nec vivus, nec mortuus, ero ingratus. Plura non possum; sed obnixè tes oro ut festines. Vale. earnest request accompanied him in a devout prayer, dictated by himself and uttered with great energy. In this he remarked, that his sins were best known: to himself, and out of that true sense he was more properly instructed to apply to himself the eternal sacrifice of our Saviour's passion and merits.' He then conversed upon the immortality of the soul, affixed a codicil. to his will (which for it's pious preamble, and the humane and beneficent minuteness of it's details, is highly honourable to his memory), called for solemn music to sooth and compose his disordered frame, and having bidden farewell to his afflicted brother in words which deserve to be engraven in letters of gold,* expired on the seventeenth of October, aged thirty-two, in the arms of his private secretary Mr. William Temple.† Thus perished the flower of England; the ornament and the delight, successively, of the university and of * "Love my memory: cherish my friends: their faith to me may assure you, that they are honest. But, above all, govern your will and affection by the will and word of your Creator; in me beholding the end of this world, with all her vanities." + This gentleman recorded the excellency of his patron and friend in the following compositions: 1. Gulielmi Temple in Philippum Sydnæum Tetrastichon. Qui Charis et Virtus fueras, qui Pieris ipsa- 2. Ejusdem in eundem Epitaphium. Quis jacet hic? Sidneius. Qualis? Nobilis ortu, the court; and seen with equal admiration in a field of battle and a tournament, in public as an envoy, and in private as a friend. His talents were alike adapted to prose and to verse, to original composition and to translation. Considered with respect to his poetry, however, he was certainly (as Mr. Ellis observes) too much infected with that fondness for conceit and antithesis, which the example of the Italian writers had rendered fashionable: but this fault in him was evidently the effect of imitation, not of character; and is often compensated by real wit, and 3, Navis, quá honoratissimi Sidneii corpus Flushingá Londinum advehebatur, de suo atro apparatu et nobilitate vecturæ ; Auctore Gulielmo Temple. Cur atra sim quæris. Sidneii ad sidera rapti 1. Had Virtue, Grace, or Muse alone Claim for long years on earth to shine; F. W. 2. Who sleeps beneath? Sidney. His worth declare: How fell he? On the Gueldrian fields he fell, 1 His firm trust fix'd upon the Crucified. F. W. 3. Ask you my hue's sad cause? To me 'tis given F. W. A more minute detail of the circumstances of his death by Mr. Giffard, a minister whom he sent for, eight days after he was stricken,' is printed by Dr. Zouch, pp. 266-277, from a MS. preserved in the British Museum. |