The popularity of the book, rivalling that of _Euphues_, is illustrated by the number of editions, of which a list will be given later. Sidney found writers eager to continue the story, and many imitators. The argument of John Day’s _Ile of Guls_ (1606) was “a little string or rivolet drawne from the full streme of the right worthy gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydney’s well knowne Archadea.” Shirley dramatised many episodes in his _Pastorall called the Arcadia_ (1640); the story of the dispossessed king of Paphlagonia and his son is probably the germ of Shakespeare’s episode of Gloucester and his sons in _King Lear_, and Mr C. Crawford has found traces of copying in the _Duchess of Malfi_ and other plays of Webster. The author of the _Emblemes_, Francis Quarles, made a long poem out of the story of Argalus and Parthenia (1622); and other writers linked their compositions to the popularity and prestige of the _Arcadia_ by using Sidney’s name as their advertisement, like the author of _Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania_ (1606), a philosophical poem dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and the Lady Mary Wroath, a niece of Sidney, who produced a slavish imitation in _The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania_ {xxiii} (1621), and made great play with her pedigree on the title-page. Excerpts and adaptations were published right down to the late seventeenth century. The first edition of the _Arcadia_ was published in 1590, four years after the author’s death. He did not finish the book, which had been begun for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was in exile from the court and living at Wilton House, the seat of the Pembrokes. It was Sidney’s dying request that the manuscript should be destroyed, and the dedicatory epistle to his sister expresses how little he valued the book as a literary performance:-- “If you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh error in the balance of good-will, I hope for the father’s sake it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being a trifle, and that triflingly handled.”