From Paris Sidney travelled on by way of Heidelberg to Frankfort, where he lodged at a printer’s, and found a warm friend in Hubert Languet, whose letters to him have been published. Sidney was eighteen and Languet fifty-five, a French Huguenot, learned and zealous for the Protestant cause, who had been Professor of Civil Law in Padua, and who was acting as secret minister for the Elector of Saxony when he first knew Sidney, and saw in him a future statesman whose character and genius would give him weight in the counsels of England, and make him a main hope of the Protestant cause in Europe. Sidney travelled on with Hubert Languet from Frankfort to Vienna, visited Hungary, then passed to Italy, making for eight weeks Venice his head-quarters, and then giving six weeks to Padua. He returned through Germany to England, and was in attendance it the Court of Queen Elizabeth in July, 1575. Next month his father was sent to Ireland as Lord Deputy, and Sidney lived in London with his mother. At this time the opposition of the Mayor and Corporation of the City of London to the acting of plays by servants of Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, who had obtained a patent for them, obliged the actors to cease from hiring rooms or inn yards in the City, and build themselves a house of their own a little way outside one of the City gates, and wholly outside the Lord Mayor’s jurisdiction. Thus the first theatre came to be built in England in the year 1576. Shakespeare was then but twelve years old, and it was ten years later that he came to London. In February, 1577, Philip Sidney, not yet twenty-three years old, was sent on a formal embassy of congratulation to Rudolph II. upon his becoming Emperor of Germany, but under the duties of the formal embassy was the charge of watching for opportunities of helping forward a Protestant League among the princes of Germany. On his way home through the Netherlands he was to convey Queen Elizabeth’s congratulations to William of Orange on the birth of his first child, and what impression he made upon that leader of men is shown by a message William sent afterwards through Fulke Greville to Queen Elizabeth. He said “that if he could judge, her Majesty had one of the ripest and greatest counsellors of State in Philip Sidney that then lived in Europe; to the trial of which he was pleased to leave his own credit engaged until her Majesty was pleased to employ this gentleman, either amongst her friends or enemies.” Sidney returned from his embassy in June, 1577. At the time of his departure, in the preceding February, his sister Mary, then twenty years old, had become the third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and her new home as Countess of Pembroke was in the great house at Wilton, about three miles from Salisbury. She had a measure of her brother’s genius, and was of like noble strain. Spenser described her as