Sidney, according to his friend Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, had the highest moral and political purposes, in writing his "Arcadia": "In all these creatures of his making, his interest and scope was, to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life; and in them, first on the monarchs part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of princes, changes of government and lawes ... Then again in the subjects case, the state of favour, disfavour, prosperitie, adversity ... and all other moodes of private fortunes or misfortunes, in which traverses, I know, his purpose was to limn out such exact pictures of every posture in the minde, that any man might see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversitie."[201] When Greville wrote thus, Sidney was dead, and in his retrospect of his friend's life he was with perfect good faith discovering high, not to say holy motives, for all his actions. Sidney's own explanation suits his work better; he was delivering his "young head" of "many, many fancies," and their main object was not politics, but love. He described it as it was known and practised in his time. Most of the heroes in the "Arcadia," talk like Surrey, Wyatt, Watson, and all the "amourists" of the century, like Sidney himself when he addressed another than Stella. The modesty of their characters is equal to their tenderness; valiant as lions before the enemy, they tremble like the leaf before their mistresses; they feed on smiles and tender glances; when they have to suffer a scarcity of this heavenly food they can only die: "Hee dieth: it is most true, hee dieth; and he in whom you live dieth. Whereof if though hee plaine, hee doth not complaine: for it is a harme but no wrong which hee hath received. He dies, because in wofull language all his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure." Fair Pamela feels deeply moved when reading this, and confesses her harshness; she denied him a look: "Two times I must confess," says she to her sister, not without a pretty touch of humour of a very modern sort, "I was about to take curtesie into mine eyes, but both times the former resolution stopt the entrie of it: so, that hee departed without obtaining any further kindenesse. But he was no sooner out of the doore, but that I looked to the doore kindly!" The poor lover who did not see this change in his lady's countenance went away fainting, "as if he had beene but the coffin that carried himselfe to his sepulchre!"[202]