There were many points in which the case of Sidney resembled that of Charles I. He was a sovereign, but of a nobler kind—­a sovereign in the hearts of men; and after his premature death he was truly, as he hath been styled, ‘the world-mourned Sidney.’  So fondly did the admiration of his contemporaries settle upon him, that the sudden removal of a man so good, great, and thoroughly accomplished, wrought upon many even to repining, and to the questioning the dispensations of Providence.  Yet he, whom Spenser and all the men of genius of his age had tenderly bemoaned, is thus commemorated upon his tomb-stone; and to add to the indignity, the memorial is nothing more than the second-hand coat of a French commander!  It is a servile translation from a French epitaph, which says Weever, ’was by some English Wit happily imitated and ingeniously applied to the honour of our worthy chieftain.’  Yet Weever in a foregoing paragraph thus expresses himself upon the same subject; giving without his own knowledge, in my opinion, an example of the manner in which an epitaph ought to have been composed:  ’But I cannot pass over in silence Sir Philip Sidney, the elder brother, being (to use Camden’s words) the glorious star of this family, a lively pattern of virtue, and the lovely joy of all the learned sort; who fighting valiantly with the enemy before Zutphen in Geldesland, dyed manfully.  This is that Sidney, whom, as God’s will was, he should therefore be born into the world even to shew unto our age a sample of ancient virtues:  so His good pleasure was, before any man looked for it, to call for him again and take him out of the world, as being more worthy of heaven than earth.  Thus we may see perfect virtue suddenly vanisheth out of sight, and the best men continue not long.’

There can be no need to analyse this simple effusion of the moment in order to contrast it with the laboured composition before given; the difference will flash upon the Reader at once.  But I may say it is not likely that such a frigid composition as the former would have ever been applied to a man whose death had so stirred up the hearts of his contemporaries, if it had not been felt that something different from that nature which each man carried in his own breast was in his case requisite; and that a certain straining of mind was inseparable from the subject.  Accordingly, an epitaph is adopted in which the Writer had turned from the genuine affections and their self-forgetting inspirations, to the end that his understanding, or the faculty designated by the word head as opposed to heart, might curiously construct a fabric to be wondered at.  Hyperbole in the language of Montrose is a mean instrument made mighty because wielded by an afflicted soul, and strangeness is here the order of Nature.  Montrose stretched after remote things, but was at the same time propelled towards them; the French Writer goes deliberately in search of them:  no wonder then if what he brings home does not prove worth the carriage.