Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence (for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula, “As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,” can make it. [SN: _The_ Arcadia.] With Sidney’s _Arcadia_[80] we come to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a _précieuse_, and who was all her life the centre of some literary coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen. The _Arcadia_, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a fragment, though a large one. The _Arcadia_ is much longer than the “tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it is much more a _Libro de Caballerías_. There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly Deeds”--challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the _Amadis_ or the _Palmerin_. It is a very entangled book, and is not made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them. [SN: _Sidney’s style._]