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Page 242.  SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY.

London Magazine, September, 1823, where it was entitled “Nugae Criticae.  By the Author of Elia.  No. 1.  Defence of the Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney.”  Signed “L.”  The second and last of the “Nugae Criticae” series was the note on “The Tempest” (see Vol.  I.).

It may be interesting here to relate that Henry Francis Gary, the translator of Dante, and Lamb’s friend, had, says his son in his memoir, lent Lamb Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, which was returned after Lamb’s death by Edward Moxon, with the leaf folded down at the account of Sir Philip Sidney.  Mr. Gary thereupon wrote his “Lines to the memory of Charles Lamb,” which begin:—­

  So should it be, my gentle friend;
  Thy leaf last closed at Sidney’s end. 
  Thou, too, like Sidney, wouldst have given
  The water, thirsting and near heaven.

Lamb has some interesting references to Sidney in the note to Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy” in the Dramatic Specimens.

Page 243, line 5. Tibullus, or the ...  Author of the Schoolmistress.  In the London Magazine Lamb wrote “Catullus.”  Tibullus was one of the tenderest of Latin poets.  William Shenstone (1714-1763) wrote “The Schoolmistress,” a favourite poem with Lamb.  The “prettiest of poems” he called it in a letter to John Clare.

Page 243, line 9. Ad Leonoram.  The following translation of Milton’s sonnet was made by Leigh Hunt:—­

  TO LEONORA SINGING AT ROME

  To every one (so have ye faith) is given
  A winged guardian from the ranks of heaven. 
  A greater, Leonora, visits thee: 
  Thy voice proclaims the present deity. 
  Either the present deity we hear,
  Or he of the third heaven hath left his sphere,
  And through the bosom’s pure and warbling wells,
  Breathes tenderly his smoothed oracles;
  Breathes tenderly, and so with easy rounds
  Teaches our mortal hearts to bear immortal sounds. 
  If God is all, and in all nature dwells,
  In thee alone he speaks, mute ruler in all else.

The Latin in Masson’s edition of Milton differs here and there from Lamb’s version.

Page 243. Sonnet I.  Lamb cites the sonnets from Astrophel and Stella, in his own order.  That which he calls I. is XXXI.; II., XXXIX.; III., XXIII.; IV., XXVII.; V., XLI.; VI., LIII.; VII., LXIV.; VIII., LXXIII.; IX., LXXIV.; X., LXXV.; XI., CIII.; XII., LXXXIV.  I have left the sonnets as Lamb copied them, but there are certain differences noted in my large edition.

Page 247, middle. Which I have ... heard objected.  A criticism of Hazlitt’s, in his sixth lecture on Elizabethan literature, delivered in 1820 at the Surrey Institution, is here criticised.  Hazlitt’s remarks on Sidney were uniformly slighting.  “His sonnets inlaid in the Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch’d and frigid.... [The Arcadia] is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record.... [Sidney is] a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so;” and so forth.  The lectures were published in 1821.  Elsewhere, however, Hazlitt found in Sidney much to praise.