“The gentlest shepherdess that lives this day, And most resembling, both in shape and spright, Her brother dear.” Ben Jonson, long after her brother had passed from earth, wrote upon her death the well-known epitaph:— “Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother. Death, ere thou hast slain another, Learn’d, and fair, and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee.” Sidney’s sister became Pembroke’s mother in 1580, while her brother Philip was staying with her at Wilton. He had early in the year written a long argument to the Queen against the project of her marriage with the Duke of Anjou, which she then found it politic to seem to favour. She liked Sidney well, but resented, or appeared to resent, his intrusion of advice; he also was discontented with what seemed to be her policy, and he withdrew from Court for a time. That time of seclusion, after the end of March, 1580, he spent with his sister at Wilton. They versified psalms together; and he began to write for her amusement when she had her baby first upon her hands, his romance of “Arcadia.” It was never finished. Much was written at Wilton in the summer of 1580, the rest in 1581, written, as he said in a letter to her, “only for you, only to you . . . for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done.” He never meant that it should be published; indeed, when dying he asked that it should be destroyed; but it belonged to a sister who prized the lightest word of his, and after his death it was published in 1590 as “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.”