A Defence of Poesie and Poems | Page 3

and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author
of the work, although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters
may be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and
additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at

no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the
program that displays the etext (as is the case, for instance, with most
word processors); OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original
plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
net profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to
calculate your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is
due. Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following
each
date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your
annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO? The Project gratefully accepts contributions in
money, time, scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts,
royalty free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution you
can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association /
Carnegie-Mellon University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]

from the 1891 Cassell & Company edition.
A DEFENCE OF POESIE AND POEMS
Contents:

Introduction by Henry Morley
A Defence of Poesie
Poems
INTRODUCTION
Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, in Kent, on the 29th of November,
1554. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, had married Mary, eldest daughter
of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and Philip was the eldest of
their family of three sons and four daughters. Edmund Spenser and
Walter Raleigh were of like age with Philip Sidney, differing only by
about a year, and when Elizabeth became queen, on the 17th of
November, 1558, they were children of four or five years old.
In the year 1560 Sir Henry Sidney was made Lord President of Wales,
representing the Queen in Wales and the four adjacent western counties,
as a Lord Deputy represented her in Ireland. The official residence of
the Lord President was at Ludlow Castle, to which Philip Sidney went
with his family when a child of six. In the same year his father was
installed as a Knight of the Garter. When in his tenth year Philip Sidney
was sent from Ludlow to Shrewsbury Grammar School, where he
studied for three or four years, and had among his schoolfellows Fulke
Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, who remained until the end of
Sidney's life one of his closest friends. When he himself was dying he
directed that he should be described upon his tomb as "Fulke Greville,
servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, and friend to Sir
Philip Sidney." Even Dr. Thomas Thornton, Canon of Christ Church,
Oxford, under whom Sidney was placed when he was entered to Christ
Church in his fourteenth year, at Midsummer, in 1568, had it
afterwards recorded on his tomb that he was "the tutor of Sir Philip
Sidney."
Sidney was in his eighteenth year in May, 1572, when he left the
University to continue his training for the service of the state, by travel
on the Continent. Licensed to travel with horses for himself and three
servants, Philip Sidney left London in the train of the Earl of Lincoln,
who was going out as ambassador to Charles IX., in Paris. He was in
Paris on the 24th of August in that year, which was the day of the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was sheltered from the dangers of

that day in the house of the English Ambassador, Sir Francis
Walsingham, whose daughter Fanny Sidney married twelve years
afterwards.
From Paris Sidney travelled on by way of Heidelberg to Frankfort,
where he lodged at a printer's, and found a warm friend in Hubert
Languet, whose letters to him have been published. Sidney was
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