In general the Arcadia is no more than it purports to be, the ’many fancies’ of Sidney’s fertile imagination poured forth in courtly guise for the entertainment of his sister, though his own more serious thoughts occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet.  More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148].  These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise is a mere veil shielding them from the crude uncompromising light of actuality, with its prejudice in favour of the probable; while the few rustic personages merely supply a not very successful comic antimasque.

To the popularity of the Arcadia it is hardly necessary to advert.  It has been repeatedly printed, added to, imitated, abbreviated, modernized, popularized; four editions appeared during the last decade of the sixteenth century, nine between the beginning of the seventeenth and the outbreak of the civil wars[149].  It was first published at a moment when the public was beginning to tire of Euphuism, and when the heroic death of the author had recently set a seal upon the brilliance of his fame.  Looking back in after years, writers who, like Drayton, had lived through the movement from its very birth, could speak of Sidney as of the author who

                        did first reduce
    Our tongue from Lyly’s writing then in use,

and could praise his style as a model of pure English.  In spite of the generous, if misguided, efforts of occasional critics, posterity has not seen fit to endorse this view.  While finding in Sidney’s style the same historical importance as in Lyly’s, we cannot but recognize that in itself Arcadianism was little if at all better than Euphuism.  It is just as formal, just as much a trick, just as stilted and unpliable, just as painful an illustration of the fact that a figure of rhetoric may be an occasional ornament, but cannot by any degree of ingenuity be made to serve as a basis of composition.  In the same way as Euphuism is founded upon a balance of the sentence obtained by antithetical clauses, and the use of intricate alliteration, together with the abuse of simile and metaphor drawn from what has been aptly termed Lyly’s ’un-natural history’; so Sidney’s style in the Arcadia is based on a balance usually obtained by a repetition of the same word or a jingle of similar ones, together with the abuse of periphrasis, and, it may be added, of the pathetic fallacy.  These last have been dangers in all periods of stylistic experiment; the former, figures duly noted as ornaments by contemporary rhetoricians, Sidney no doubt borrowed from Spain.  There in one famous example they were shortly to excite the