Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, within an easy drive’s distance from Salisbury, was the first nobleman’s residence I saw in my early visit.  Not a great deal of what I then saw had survived in my memory.  I recall the general effect of the stately mansion and its grounds.  A picture or two of Vandyke’s had not quite faded out of my recollection.  I could not forget the armor of Anne de Montmorenci,—­not another Maid of Orleans, but Constable of France,—­said to have been taken in battle by an ancestor of the Herberts.  It was one of the first things that made me feel I was in the Old World.  Miles Standish’s sword was as far back as New England collections of armor carried us at that day.  The remarkable gallery of ancient sculptures impressed me at the time, but no one bust or statue survived as a distinct image.  Even the beautiful Palladian bridge had not pictured itself on my mental tablet as it should have done, and I could not have taken my oath that I had seen it.  But the pretty English maidens whom we met on the day of our visit to Wilton,—­daughters or granddaughters of a famous inventor and engineer,—­still lingered as vague and pleasing visions, so lovely had they seemed among the daisies and primroses.  The primroses and daisies were as fresh in the spring of 1886 as they were in the spring of 1833, but I hardly dared to ask after the blooming maidens of that early period.

One memory predominates over all others, in walking through the halls, or still more in wandering through the grounds, of Wilton House.  Here Sir Philip Sidney wrote his “Arcadia,” and the ever youthful presence of the man himself rather than the recollection of his writings takes possession of us.  There are three young men in history whose names always present themselves to me in a special companionship:  Pico della Mirandola, “the Phoenix of the Age” for his contemporaries; “the Admirable Crichton,” accepting as true the accounts which have come down to us of his wonderful accomplishments; and Sidney, the Bayard of England, “that glorious star, that lively pattern of virtue and the lovely joy of all the learned sort, ... born into the world to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtue.”  The English paragon of excellence was but thirty-two years old when he was slain at Zutphen, the Italian Phoenix but thirty-one when he was carried off by a fever, and the Scotch prodigy of gifts and attainments was only twenty-two when he was assassinated by his worthless pupil.  Sir Philip Sidney is better remembered by the draught of water he gave the dying soldier than by all the waters he ever drew from the fountain of the Muses, considerable as are the merits of his prose and verse.  But here, where he came to cool his fiery spirit after the bitter insult he had received from the Earl of Leicester; here, where he mused and wrote, and shaped his lofty plans for a glorious future, he lives once more in our imagination, as if his spirit haunted the English Arcadia he loved so dearly.