Why, pray, should he not have been? Consider that in all his young life he was wrapped in purple. It is no bad thing in any day to be born eldest son of an old and wealthy and titled family of England; but it is something more to be born eldest son of a Sidney--nephew to Leicester, prime favorite of the Queen, cousin to the Northumberlands, the Sutherlands, the Warwicks--heir to that old baronial pile of Penshurst, toward which summer loiterers go now, every year, from far-away countries--to admire its red roofs--its gray walls curtained with ivy--its tall chimneys, that have smoked with the goodly hospitalities of centuries--its charming wood-walks, that Ben Jonson and Spenser and Massinger have known--its courts and parterres and terraces, where “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” gathered posies--its far-reaching lovely landscape, with Penshurst church cropping out near by--blue, hazy heights off by Tunbridge--lanes bowered with hedge-rows--wide-lying wavy, grain-fields, and sheep feeding in the hollows of the hills. He was born heir to all this, I say, and had the best masters, the tenderest and the worthiest of mothers--who writes to him in this style, “Your noble Father hath taken pains, with his own hand, to give you in this--His Letter--so wise precepts for you to follow with a diligent mind, as I will not withdraw your eyes from beholding, and reverent honoring the same--no, not so long a time as to read any letter from me: Wherefor--I only bless you--with my desire to God to plant in you his grace, and have always before your mind the excellent councils of my Lord, your dear Father: Farewell, my little Philip; and, once again, the Lord bless you! “Your loving mother, “MARIE SIDNEY.” Ought not a boy, with such a mother, and Penshurst in prospect, and cousinly relations with the Talbots and Howards and Stanleys to be gentlemanly and amiable? Then--his great-uncle--Leicester (who is Chancellor of the University) writes up to Oxford, where young Sidney is reading for his degree--“Pray have my boy, Philip Sidney, who is delicate, excused from fasting during Lent.” And there is a plot afoot to marry this young Oxford man to Anne, daughter of that Lord Burleigh I told you of, and there are letters about the negotiation still extant. Would you like to hear how Lord Burleigh discusses his daughter’s affairs? “I have been pressed,” he says, “with kind offers of my lord of Leicester, and have accorded with him, upon articles (by a manner of A. B. C.) without naming persons--that--if P. S. and A. C. hereafter shall like to marry, then shall H. S. (father of P. S.) make assurances, etc., and W. C. [that’s Lord Burleigh] father of A. C. shall pay, etc.: What may follow, I know not: but meanwhile P. S. and A. C. shall have full liberty.”