SOURCE: "Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History," in Bibliotheque D' Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXVI, 1964, pp. 608-17.

In the following essay, Levy discusses why Sidney believed poetry superior to history as a teacher of morality.

Sometime around the end of the sixteenth century a change took place in the reasons men gave for writing history. The nature of the change is obvious to anyone who has compared the works of Sir John Hayward or the Annals of William Camden with the writing of Hall or Holinshed, let alone with the Mirror for Magistrates. To put the matter crudely, early in the century history was a branch of moral philosophy, later a branch of politics.¹ During this crucial period, few Englishmen wrote on the theory of history at all; and of those who did, the most profound was probably Sir Philip Sidney, who touched on history only...