having discovered that Tasso resided at Padua when Sidney was there, by the assistance of a certain historian (whose name appears to be LITTLE DOUBT) has boldly described their interview. The reader may take the following extract, as a fair specimen how the secret history of Queen Mab, may yet be written in the most authentick manner!

"The celebrated Tasso was then resident at Padua, and there is LITTLE DOUBT Mr. Sidney visited this seat of learning, with a desire to partake of the conversation of our poet. The ardour with which they met, may be more easily conceived than described. Both of them glowing with all the fire of native genius, and equally emulous to excel in every thing honourable, &c. &c. How fervent, &c. &c. must their friendship have been!" p. 66.

"Sidney," says Dr. Zouch, "left Venice and came to Padua, June 1574." p. 65. "The celebrated Tasso was then resident at Padua." p. 66. Now we must inform Dr. Z. that in 1574, Tasso was "resident" at Ferrara. A meeting took place there between Henry III. then returning to France, and Alphonso, the patron of Tasso; and the poet accompanied the duke to Venice, July 1574. There he indulged in the festivities of the place, to the neglect of his "Jerusalem," till he was seized with a quartan fever. From Venice he went back to Ferrara, and was confined there all the winter by extreme debility. All this appears in a letter of the poet to the pronotary Porzia, inserted in Serassi's elaborate and most interesting "Life of Tasso."

Tasso was, indeed, at Padua, during the month of March, 1575, consulting the criticks of the academy there; and we are inclined to suspect that criticism contributed even more than love, to derange the irritable faculties of this too feeling poet. Now Sidney, by the doctor's own account, p. 82, returned to England, through Germany, passing through various cities, in May, 1575. So that the whole of this rapturous superstructure is over

thrown. We are sorry thus to differ from Dr. Zouch; but our duty to the publick will not permit us to see this LITTLE DOUBT, under the sanction of his authority, ranked among the Bayles, the Johnsons, or even the Birches of the day. We are convinced that Sidney never had an interview with Tasso. An event so interesting in the life of a poet, he who commemorated characters and events of less importance, had certainly not buried in silence.

We are informed of a fact highly curious and characteristick of the age, that when Sidney conversed with the literati of the church of Rome, his English friends, as well as Languet, suspected that he was becoming a proselyte. The latter conjured him not to go to Rome, that seat of ancient glory, which had inflamed the curiosity of his classick mind.

Sidney followed the harsh counsel, and regretted it ever after. jected a journey to Constantinople, Since Rome was forbidden, he proin which Languet acquiesced; and probably would have preferred that Sidney should become a Turk, rather than a Papist !

Languet darkens the Italian character. He trembles for the purity of Sidney's morals, "now whiter than snow," and describes the subtle craftiness of the Genoese; the dissolving libertinism of the Venetians; and the theological Machiavelism of the Romans.

There is no reason to think that the mind of Sidney was ever tainted. nition: "To be always virtuously He followed his pious father's admoemployed."

On his return to England, he became the admiration and delight of the English court. The queen called him her" Philip."* Elizabeth, with such ambiguous coquetry, gratified

In opposition, perhaps, to her sister's Philip; ; for Sidney's father had given him this name to flatter Mary's fondness for

her husband.

Here, however, we find the fault, which prevails throughout this work; an indistinctness of description, which loses itself, in what we may term, the volubility of the pen. Had the author freed himself from some of this redundance of language, he might have found leisure to give us the fact to which he alluded. We recollect what Philip of Spain, no admirer of hereticks, declared on the death of Sidney, that "England had lost in one moment, what she might not produce in an age!"

Sidney distinguished himself as the advocate of his father, against a faction who had drawn up articles of impeachment on his administration in Ireland. His father was reinstated in the queen's favour. But the fervent spirit of Sidney, in every thing which touched his romantick feelings of honour, had nearly involved him in an open quarrel with the earl of Ormond. He chose to be sullenly silent when the earl addressed him. But the earl conducted himself more nobly, by saying, "he would accept no quarrel from a gentleman, who is bound by nature to defend his father's cause, and who is furnished with so many virtues as he knows Mr. Philip to be."

When Elizabeth's proposed mar riage with the duke of Anjou divided the nation into two parties, Sidney was foremost among the strenuous opposers of that mischievous design, He addressed a letter to her majesty, which Hume has justly characterized for its elegance, and its forcible reasoning. The head of the French faction (for even in better times, France found a faction among the dissolute and the desperate part of the nation) was the earl of Oxford, a man of ruined fortune, and blasted reputa tion. Some altercation ensued, in which the earl scornfully called Sidney a puppy!" A challenge passed between them, but the queen interposed. Her argument must have mortified the haughty spirit of Sidney. It turned on "the difference in

degree between earls and gentlemen;" and "how the gentleman's neglect of the nobility taught the peasant to insult both." Sidney, with adroit flattery, converted the argument of her majesty to its own confutation, by appealing to her, who " had willed that her sovereignty should be guided by the same laws as her people.-The earl of Oxford was a great lord; yet he was no lord over him,—and therefore the difference of degrees between freemen, could not challenge any other homage, than precedency." The queen was not displeased with this elevated strain from her knight. Sidney, however, incapable of submission, retired from court. Some of these particulars may be found in the narrative of Fulke Greville. They are not detailed in Dr. Zouch.

Languet had often seriously exhorted his young friend not to imitate his royal mistress in her preference of a life of celibacy. In 1583, Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, whom Jonson congratulates in one of his epigrams. He was also knighted, an honour which, like all others, the queen "bestowed with frugality and choice."

Sidney had not yet obtained, what he seems to have long desired-some splendid occasion to manifest his heroick disposition. When sir Francis Drake returned from his first expedition, the novelty of his discoveries, and perhaps the treasures he poured into the queen's coffers, inflamed the nation. Foreigners, indeed, considered Drake as the greatest pirate that ever infested the seas; but in England, he was admired as a new Columbus. Shakspeare alludes to this temporary passion of the times:

Some to the wars to try their fortune there;

"Some to discover islands far away." Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Weary of inaction, and inspired by a romantick fancy of founding a new empire of his own, of which sir Fulke Greville has given a most extraordinary account, Sidney secretly planned with Drake, to join him in his second expedition. Dr. Zouch tells but half his tale. Sir Fulke Greville has supplied many curious particulars. After giving a sketch of this wild design, he details the shrewd inventions which Sidney condescended to practise, to reach Plymouth, "overshoot ing Walsingham in his own bow;" and his bold contrivance to intercept the queen's messenger, by employing two soldiers in disguise, to take his letters from him; nor would he leave Plymouth till the queen despatched a peer to command his immediate return. These and other facts, which Dr. Zouch seems purposely to conceal in his perpetual panegyrick, are surely of importance. They let us a little into the character of Sidney-his sullen conduct to the earl of Ormond; his letter to his father's steward, threatening his life, on a rash supposition that he betrayed his correspondence; his virulent defence of his uncle; all these were the sins of his youth. His infirmity was rashness and impetuosity of temper.

An honour, less ambiguous than a West India expedition, was reserved for Sidney. His friends abroad named him as a competitor for the elective crown of Poland, in 1585. That character must approach to excel lence, which could create a party among distant foreigners, uninfluenced by corruption, to offer a crown to an English knight!

The queen, however, one historian writes, was "jealous of losing the jewel of her times;" and another, that "she was jealous that any of her subjects should be kings." "I will not allow," said Elizabeth, "that my sheep

shall be marked with a stranger's mark; nor that they follow the whis tle of a foreign shepherd!"

The queen opened a fairer field of honour in appointing Sidney to the government of Flushing, having resolved to assist the protestant inha bitants of the Netherlands against Spanish oppression. His uncle Leicester, who afterwards disappointed England and her allies, by his want of wisdom and military skill, followed, with an army. On this intercourse of the English with the Flemish, Dr. Zouch appositely observes from Camden, that "the English, which of all the northern nations had been the least drinkers, learned, by these Netherland wars, to drown themselves with immoderate drinking, and by drinking to other's health, to impair their own." A philosophical antiquary may discover, in our continent. al wars, the origin of many of our worst customs, and not a few of our vices.

In this first and last campaign of the young hero, he marked his short career, by enterprise and inventioncombining these ardent military qualities with that penetration and pru dence, which form a great general. Before he entered into action, he warmed his soldiers by a patriotick address. He revived the ancient dis cipline of order and silence in his march; and when he was treache rously invited to take Gravelin, he only ventured a small detachment of his army, by which means, the rest were saved. He was the soldiers' friend, and remunerated them, in proportion to their merits, out of his private fortune.

In the hope, but scarcely having yet attained to the pride, of military fame, fell the Marcellus of his country and his age! In a skirmish before Zutphen, "so impetuous that it be came a proverbial expression among the Belgian soldiers to denote a most severe and ardent conflict," Sidney, having one horse shot under him, and mounting a second, rushed for

ward to recover lord Willoughby, surrounded by the enemy. He succeeded, and continued the fight till he was wounded by a bullet in the left knee.

The most beautiful event in his life, was his death. From the moment he was wounded, and thirsty with excess of bleeding, when he turned away the water from his own lips, to give it to a dying soldier, with these words: "Thy necessity is still greater than mine!" to his last hour, he marked the grandeur, and the tenderness of his nature.

Dr. Zouch informs us that "an ode which was composed by him on the nature of his wound, discovered a mind perfectly serene and calm." We wish our author had been satisfied with having informed us of this fact; but he proceeds with a strange and superfluous apology for a dying poet composing an ode.

"These efforts of his expiring muse will not surely subject him to censure and reproach. It is impossible to suggest that they were disfigured by any sentiments of rashness and impiety. They were exercised on a subject of the most serious nature, on a wound which was likely to terminate in death."

This paragraph is a fair specimen of the literary merits of this work. The author is never satisfied with telling all he knows--for he seems oppressed by a flux of phrases. It is a ridiculous anxiety, to be alarmed for the piety of his hero, in writing a death-bed ode. Were not the odes

of David composed by the same feel ings, under the influence of the most trying occasions?

Other particulars are recorded of his death, which give a most interesting picture of his heroism, his philosophy, and his religion.

The night before he died, leaning upon a pillow in his bed, he wrote a short, but pathetick, note to a physician; and an epistle to a divine, in elegant Latin, which for "its pithiness of matter," was presented to the queen. He conversed on the im

VOL. II.

mortality of the soul, and compared the conjectures of the pagan philosophy with the truths of revelation. On the day he died, he affixed a codicil to his will; and called for musick, and particularly for the ode which has made Dr. Zouch so uneasy, "to procure repose to his disordered frame." With the same dignified composure he bade adieu to his brother; and exhorted him to cherish his friends: "Their faith to me may assure you that they are honest." He made an extempore prayer before his death-a circumstance which renews the doctor's uneasiness. He conjures up a question, which he cannot lay, concerning "publick "We worship led by a layman." are not hence to conclude," he writes, "that Sidney professed a religion peculiar to himself; nor that he derived any singular sentiments from Languet, &c."-by which means, we are furnished with a page of articles that we are not to conclude about.

Of the interminable narrative of Sidney's death, written by Mr. George Giffard, a preacher of the times, we should have been thankful to Dr. Zouch had he taken the pains to have read and not printed it. But to the eyes of an antiquary, there is something magical in a MS.

We regret to find that the last moments of Sidney were disturbed by fard, who never ceased "proving to the misdirected piety of this Mr. Gifhim by testimonies and infallible reasons out of the scriptures" every thing that came into his head. When Sidney was in the last agony (says the MS.) and all natural heat and life were almost utterly gone out of him; that his understanding had failed, and that it was to no purpose to speak any more to him-" then it was that the aforesaid Mr. Giffard made a long speech, and required the expiring Sidney to hold up his hand,' which we thought he could scarce have moved." Documents of this kind are more fanatick than historical; and more tedious than fanatick.