And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. [Sidenote: _and their ample compensation._] That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the _Faerie Queene_, that was to give us _Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_. What though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body _is_ art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the _afflatus_, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French. In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s _afflatus_, but all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for more than a century. [Sidenote: _King James’s_ Reulis and Cautelis.] These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”) _Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie_, 1585; William Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poesie_, next year; and the anonymous _Arte of English Poesie_, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George Puttenham.[248] ----- Footnote 247: It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death. Footnote 248: All three are included in Mr. Arber’s _Reprints_, where the desirable, or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly found. -----