To my mind the gracious humanity--the exquisite naturalness of this is worth an ocean of cloying prettinesses about _Gloriana_ and _Britomart_. Not very many years after this--just how many we cannot say--comes the great tragedy of his life: A new Irish rebellion (that of Tyrone) sends up its tide of fire and blood around his home of Kilcolman; his crops, his barns, his cattle, his poor babe[92]--the last born--all are smothered, and consumed away in that fiery wrack and ruin. He makes his way broken-hearted to London again; his old welcome as an adulator of the Queen is at an end; Raleigh is not actively helpful; Sidney is dead; he has some cheap lodging almost under the shadow of Westminster: He is sick, maimed in body and in soul; other accounts--not yet wholly discredited--represent him as miserably poor; bread, even, hard to come by; my Lord of Essex--a new patron--sends him a few guineas; and the poor poet murmurs--too late--too late!--and so he dies (1599). How glad we should have been to help him, had we been living in that time, and all this tale of suffering had been true;--so we think: and yet, ten to one we should have said--“Poor fellow, what a pity!”--and buttoned up our pockets, as we do now. _Philip Sidney._ Meantime what has become of that Philip Sidney[93] who flashed upon us under the eyes of Elizabeth at the age of twenty-four? You know him as the chivalric soldier and the model gentleman. Students and young people all, who are under the glamour of youthful enthusiasms, are apt to have a great fondness for Philip Sidney: But if any of my young readers chance to be projecting an essay about that courteous gentleman--and I know they will, if they have not already--I would counsel them to forego any mention of the story about the dying soldier and the cup of water. It has been cruelly overworked already. Indeed it might have been matched in scores of cases upon the battle-fields of our own war: When the last shattering blow comes to our poor humanity, the better nature in us does somehow lean kindly out, in glance and in purpose. Yet Philip Sidney was certainly a man of great kindness and full of amiabilities and courtesies.