And just as men hated Dudley for his arrogance, and for his daring to think even of setting himself beside their Queen, so they loved his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, for the grace which his hand brought to everything which he touched. He fulfilled the ideal of Castiglione's Courtier. He was the antithesis of the rough, unmannered Dudley. In Dudley all the cruelty and ostentation and savage power of the time seem to find expression; whereas in Philip Sidney, all its grace and skill and poetry were manifest. Men vied with one another in his praises, men fought for the right to call him friend, and a woman became immortal by being "Sidney's sister." "Sidney, the Siren of this latter age," writes Barnefield; "divine Sir Philip," Michael Drayton calls him; and Ben Jonson, as though in defiance of the charge of exaggeration utters (you can hear him say it), "the godlike Sidney." Even the ribald Nash lowers his mad voice to the note of reverence, "Apollo hath resigned his Ivory Harpe unto Astrophel and he, like Mercury, must lull you a sleep with his musicke. Sleepe Argus, sleep Ignorance, sleep Impudence, for Mercury hath Io and onely Io Paean belongeth to Astrophel. Deare Astrophel, that in the ashes of thy Love livest againe like the Phoenix; o might thy bodie (as thy name) live againe likewise here amongst us; but the earthe, the mother of mortality hath snacht thee too soone into her chilled cold armes, and will not let thee by any meanes be drawne from her deadly imbrace; and thy divine Soule, carried on an Angels wings to heaven, is installed in Hermes place sole prolocutor to the Gods." His life was a poem, which all the men who lived with him, and all the men who knew his name, were great enough to read and to appreciate; his death is an example for all time. Fame with its common story cannot sully the brightness of the superb sacrifice of that superb self. Dudley expressed the presumptuous vitality of the Court, and Sidney its vital poetry. A little aloof from the Court, which he was apt to regard with kindly disdain at its frivolity, moved the staid figure of Burghley, the Lord High Treasurer of England, Elizabeth's great man of business, perhaps the finest political intelligence that has ever thought out a way for a country through the most complicated difficulties, at a time when disaster crouched ever ready to spring and involve that country in ruin.