What did follow was, that old Burleigh thought better of it, and married his daughter to a bigger title--that is Lord Oxford, a learned and elegant, but brutal man, who broke poor Anne Cecil’s heart. Sidney, after his Oxford course, and another at Cambridge (as some authorities say) went--as was the further mode--upon his travels: and goes, with the same golden luck upon him, to the great house of Walsingham, ambassador of England, in Paris. Why not be gentle? What is to provoke? It is quite a different thing--as many another Cambridge man knew (Spenser among them), to be gentle and bland and forbearing, when illness seizes, when poverty pinches, when friends backslide, when Heaven’s gates seem shut;--then, amiability and gentleness and forbearance are indeed crowning graces, and will unlock, I think, a good many of the doors upon the courts, where the weary shall be at rest. Sidney is at Paris when that virago Catharine de’ Medici was lording it over her sons, and over France;--there, too, as it chanced, through the slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s day, from which bloody holocaust he presently recoils, and continues his travel over the Continent, writing very charming, practical letters to his younger brother Robert: “You think my experience,” he says, “has grown from the good things I have learned: but I know the only experience which I have gotten is, to find how much I _might_ have learned and how much indeed I have missed--for want of directing my course to the right end and by the right means.” And again he tells him, “not to go travel--as many people do--merely out of a tickling humor to do as other men have done, or to talk of having been.”