In glancing through the records of the past no name upon the roll of fame strikes the eye of appreciation more pleasantly than that of Sir Philip Sidney, whose life has been called poetry put in action. He lived amid contemporary applause, and his memory is the admiration of all. The bravest of soldiers, he was also the gentlest of sons, equally illustrious for moral qualities and for intellectual genius, controlled by "that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound." No incident in history is more familiar than that of this exhausted warrior resigning the cup of water to a fainting soldier, whose need, he said, was greater than his own. Sidney was one of the brightest ornaments of Queen Elizabeth's court. Lord Brooke, who was his intimate friend, says of him: "Though I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man with such steadiness of mind, lovely and familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above greater years. His talk was ever of knowledge, and his very play tended to enrich the mind." His death occurred at the age of thirty-two, from a wound in battle, the result of his self-abnegation. He was in full armor, but seeing the marshal of the camp unprotected, he took off his armor and gave it to him, thus exposing himself to the mortal wound which he received. Fuller says, "He was slain before Zutphen, in a small skirmish which we may sadly term a great battle, considering our heavy loss therein." Victor Hugo was banished from France for his opposition to the _coup d'état_. He was ever true to his convictions without counting the cost. "If there is anything grander than Victor Hugo's genius," said Louis Blanc, "it is the use which he has made of it." He affords us an instance of the highest fame and the favor of fortune culminating in ripe old age. When Hugo was but a rising man, he was still looked upon by the elder littérateurs with considerable jealousy. At the time when he was first an aspirant for the honors of the French Academy, and called on M. Royer-Collard to solicit his vote, the sturdy veteran professed entire ignorance of his name. "I am the author of 'Notre Dame de Paris,' 'Marion Delorme,' 'Les Derniers Jours d'un Condamne,' etc." "I never heard of them," said Collard. "Will you do me the honor of accepting a copy of my works?" said Victor Hugo, with perfect urbanity. "I never read new books," was the cutting reply.[169] But the time came presently when not to know the author of "Les Misérables" was to argue one's self unknown. When he had reached the age of sixty-three he wrote on a bit of sketching paper accompanying a scene he wished to delineate in the "Toilers of the Sea:" "On the face of this cardboard I have sketched my own destiny,--a steamboat tossed by the tempest in the midst of the monstrous ocean; almost disabled, assaulted by foaming waves, and having nothing left but a bit of smoke which people call glory, which