The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary society gathered around Sir Philip Sidney in and about 1580. His high birth,--he was son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth’s sinister favourite, the Earl of Leicester,--the fact that he stood in the relation of patron to many of the men of letters of his time, his amiable personal character, and the heroic circumstances of his death in a skirmish fought to prevent a Spanish convoy from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586, have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very shining figure. It is possible that he is more conspicuous than his intrinsic power would have made him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must have been a great personal fascination in the man who could inspire the reverential love which was felt for Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Greville, while his _Apologie for Poetrie_, his _Arcadia_, the sonnets collected under the title of _Astrophel and Stella_, with his other poems, remain to prove that wherever he had been born he would have left his mark on the time. [SN: The Apologie for Poetrie.] _The Arcadia_ may be left aside for the present, but _The Apologie for Poetrie_, though written in prose, cannot, without violently separating things akin to one another, be taken apart from his poetry. It is to some extent our English equivalent for the _Deffense et Illustration de la Langue française_ of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new school of poets. The circumstances in which the two were written differ widely. The Pléiade, with the Frenchman’s usual love of a large and minute _ordonnance_, drew up a scheme for the conquest and orderly division of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was provoked into writing his little treatise by a very foolish tract printed in 1579, and named _The School of Abuse_, the work of one Stephen Gosson (1535-1624), an unsuccessful playwright who took orders, and lived to a great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. _The School of Abuse_, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney without his consent, and perhaps because he was the nephew of the chief protector of the Puritans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as it contains a statement of the narrow puritan view that all modern poetry was wicked, and that the theatre was the home of every corruption. It is chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the signal honour to give it an answer. _The Apologie for Poetrie_ is in no sense an _Ars Poetica_. Sidney does not deal with the formal part of poetry. He replies to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion that it is the noblest of all things. The view and the spirit of the Elizabethan time are nowhere more clearly shown than in the _Apologie_. That Sidney fell into one gross heresy is true. He said that poetry was independent of metre. But that was not an error likely to mislead either himself or others.