THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA BY SIR PHILIP SIDNEY WITH THE ADDITIONS OF SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER AND RICHARD BELING, A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, AND AN INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST A. BAKER, M.A. LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Ltd. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. CONTENTS EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION LIFE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE AUTHOR SIDNEY’S DEDICATION ARCADIA BOOK I BOOK II BOOK III BOOK IV BOOK V BOOK VI (by R. B.) NOTES INTRODUCTION {vii} In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material, expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ holds an important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the successive transformations, and the final development of English fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings, when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the _chansons de gestes_.