part of the year 1580 he spent at Wilton with his sister Mary, busy with the Arcadia.  In August he had, through the influence of his uncle Leicester, become reconciled with the Queen, and a little later took up his residence at Leicester House, from which this letter is dated.  It is a mere trifle, yet it illustrates very strikingly and even touchingly Sidney’s serious, sweet, and beautiful character.  The admirable remarks on the true use of the study of history, such as ’I never require great study in Ciceronianism, the chief abuse of Oxford, qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt,’ remind us of the author of the Defence; while the ‘great part of my comfort is in you,’ ’be careful of yourself, and I shall never have cares,’ and the ’I write this to you as one that for myself have given over the delight in the world,’ show that he had estimated royal reconciliations at their true value, and anticipate the beautiful and pathetic words with which he is said to have taken leave of the world.  Short and hurried as this letter is, we feel it is one of those trifles which, as Plutarch observes, throw far more light on character than actions of importance often do.

Between 1580 and the appearance of Meres’s work in 1598 there was much activity in critical literature.  Five years before the date of Sidney’s letter George Gascogne had published his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the makyng of Verse in Rhyme.  This was succeeded in 1584 by James I.’s Ane Short Treatise conteining some rewles and cautelis to be observit.  Then came William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poesie, 1586, which had been preceded by Sidney’s charming Defence of Poetry, composed in or about 1579, but not published till 1593.  This and Puttenham’s elaborate treatise, The Art of English Poesie contrived into three books (1589), had indeed marked an epoch in the history of criticism.  Memorable, too, in this branch of literature is Harington’s Apologie for Poetry (1591), prefixed to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.  But it was not criticism only which had been advancing.  The publication of the first part of Lyly’s Euphues and of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar in 1579 may be said to have initiated the golden age of our literature.  The next twenty years saw Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman, Decker, and Ben Jonson at the head of our drama; Spenser, Warner, Daniel, and Drayton leading narrative poetry; the contributors to England’s Helicon, published a year later, at the head of our sonneteers and lyric poets; and Sidney, Lyly, Greene, and Hooker in the van of our prose literature.  The history of Meres’s work, a dissertation from which is here extracted, is curious.  In or about 1596, Nicholas Ling and John Bodenham conceived the idea of publishing a series of volumes containing proverbs, maxims, and sententious reflections on religion, morals, and life generally.  Accordingly in 1597