This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song of _Percy_ and _Duglas_ that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of _Pindar_?' but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the language of the Gods.' [The slow progress of Arcadian narrative.] The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian substitute for rain, was not the only drag on the narrative of the pastoral story-tellers. Serenity was considered essential, and so, while the story was being everlastingly shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it had also for every step it took forward to take another back in order to catch again the chosen atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result was 'a note of linked sweetness long drawn out,' a series of agitated standstills, and a narrative impossible to end. Cervantes' _Galatea_ was never finished; the last books of _Arcadia_ were written by another hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end to _l'Astrée_; and Montemor abandoned his _Diana_.