enthusiasm of the knight of La Mancha—­’The reason of the unreason which is done to my reason in such manner enfeebles my reason that with reason I lament your beauty’—­a sentence which one is sometimes tempted to imagine Sidney must have set before him as a model.  Thus it would appear that, for their essential elements, Euphuism and Arcadianism, though distinct, alike sought their models, direct or indirect, in the Spanish literature of the day.  Almost any passage, chosen at random, will illustrate Sidney’s style.  Observe the balance of clauses in the following sentence from Kalander’s speech, which inclines perhaps towards Euphuism: 

I am no herald to enquire of mens pedegrees, it sufficeth me if I know their vertues, which, if this young mans face be not a false witnes, doe better apparrell his minde, then you have done his body. (1590, fol. 8v.)

Or again, as an instance of the jingle of words, take the following from the steward’s narration: 

I thinke you thinke, that these perfections meeting, could not choose but find one another, and delight in that they found, for likenes of manners is likely in reason to drawe liking with affection; mens actions doo not alwaies crosse with reason:  to be short, it did so in deed. (ib. fol. 20.)

Of Sidney’s power of description the stock example is his account of the Arcadian landscape (fol. 7), and it is perhaps the best and at the same time the most characteristic that could be found; the author’s peculiar tricks are at once obvious.  There are ’the humble valleis, whose base estate semed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers,’ and the ’thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to by the chereful deposition of many wel-tuned birds’; there are the pastures where ’the prety lambs with bleting oratory craved the dams comfort,’ where sat the young shepherdess knitting, whose ’voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voices musick,’ a country where the scattered houses made ’a shew, as it were, of an accompanable solitarines, and of a civil wildnes,’ where lastly—­si sic omnia!—­was the ’shepheards boy piping, as though he should never be old.’  It must not be supposed that these are occasional embroideries; they are the very cloth of which the whole pastoral habit is made.  The above examples all occur within a few pages, and might even have been gathered from a yet smaller plot.  It is, however, on the prose, such as it is, that the reputation of the Arcadia rests; a good deal of occasional verse is introduced, but it has often been subject of remark how wholly unworthy of its author most of it is.