Against it has to be set his conception of poetry as the noble expression of that which in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose. There may not be much guidance in this; but it is not as a guide that the _Apologie_ is to be considered, but as the challenge of the coming English poetry, lyrical, epic, and dramatic--a declaration that it was to be something more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it was to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and thought, of fancy and imagination. If English poets of that generation looked up to Sidney, it was not only for the reasons given above, but because he spoke early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The style of the _Apologie_ is full of the animation and sincerity of the writer. It has a colour and melody unknown to the downright sober English of his predecessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and is free from the conceits of his own _Arcadia_. Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the high note of the great Elizabethan poetry. No part of his work was printed in his life. The _Arcadia_ was prepared for publication immediately after his death in 1586, but it did not appear till 1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more accurate version followed in 1593. [SN: _His Sonnets and Lyrics._] The sonnets and other lyric pieces, collected under the title of _Astrophel and Stella_, were printed in 1591, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ in 1595. His metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript till 1823, while some fragments of his verse have only been recovered recently by Dr Grosart.[62] But the date of printing was comparatively unimportant at a time when a poet’s work not only could be, but generally was, known in manuscript to the reading world long before it was published. Sidney was renowned as a poet and prose-writer in his lifetime, and his case is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count his influence as having been exercised from the day when his sonnets were handed about among his friends, which must have been as early as, if not earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must have learnt at once that the day when Gascoigne, Turberville, Googe, or an industrious decent verse-writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented English poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the same high level. The epithet of “jejune” which Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be justly used of any of them; but the sonnet beginning, “Phœbus was judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love,” or the other which has for first line, “I on my horse and love on me, doth try,” or the third, “O grammar-rules, O now your virtues show,” are not equally safe against the other epithet “frigid.” They are at least more marked by laboured and cold-blooded conceit than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have an accomplishment of form which was new, and in the others the greater qualities are by no means rarely shown. The first in the accepted