worthy of such parentage. He fought in the battle in which his brother fell, and with such bravery that he was knighted on the field. He shared with Sir Francis Vere the glory of commanding the English auxiliaries sent, in 1597, to aid Prince Maurice of Nassau against the Spaniards. He was the close friend of the unfortunate Earl of Essex. During the reign of Elizabeth,—of all sovereigns the best served yet the most niggard of honours, except to her favourites, and of them the most profuse of favours to the most unworthy, Sir Robert Sidney, like his father, never rose beyond knighthood. But after James's accession honours were showered upon him. He was created Baron Sidney of Penshurst, in May, 1603, Viscount de l'Isle three years later, Knight of the Garter in 1616, and two years after, Earl of Leicester.

This first Earl Robert married Barbara Gamage, heiress of John Gamage of Coitty, Rhogied and Llanvihangel in the County of Glamorgan, in whose veins met the blood of one of the Norman followers of the Conqueror and the Princes of Glamorgan. She was the mother of the builder of Leicester House in Leicester Fields.

Up to the reign of Elizabeth,' the Sidneys, like most of the nobility, had lived in the City. Sidney House was on the west side of the Old Bailey; but Sir Henry occupied2 Baynard's Castle, where his first son died, and where Robert was born. Robert Sidney approved himself worthy of a name, so singularly illustrious by the virtues

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1 Strange whirligig of time; this house was afterwards (says Nightingale in his "London and Middlesex," vol. iii. page 619) the office of the famous thief, fence, and thief-catcher, Jonathan Wilde.

2 This was by virtue of his office, as general surveyor of all the Queen's houses, castles, lordships, manors, woods, lands, &c., within the realm of England.

3 Collins publishes, in his "Sydney Papers," vol. i. p. 121, an amusing letter from Rowland White to Sir Robert at Flushing, telling him how his lady was brought to bed of a goodly fat son, Monday, 1st of December, 1595, 9 o' the clock at night, and that three days before she was taken ill of the measles, was full of them, and had withal a great cough and gentle fever, and was much afflicted at his absence: that the child was also full of the measles, mostly in the face, yet sucked the nurse as well as any child could and cried as strongly, so that there was great hopes of his living. Another letter, a month later, tells of the child's christening on New Year's Eve, by the Lord Montjoy, the Lord Compton, and the Lady Rich and how they had given three fair standing bowls, all of one fashion, worth £20 each.

and distinctions of those who have borne it. A student of exemplary diligence at Oxford, he was as exemplary a soldier, under his father, at Flushing. In 1616 he was made a Knight of the Bath, at the creation of Charles, Prince of Wales, and as Viscount Lisle sat in the Parliaments of the 18th and 21st years of James, as of the 1st year of Charles. In 1618 he married Dorothy Percy, eldest daughter of that eccentric but stately and studious Peer, Henry, Earl of Northumberland, who, during his fifteen years' confinement in the Tower, under James's groundless suspicion of his complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, shared the prison-studies of Raleigh, and of his friend and travelling companion, Harriot, the naturalist, and Hughes and Warner, the mathematicians, popularly known as the Duke's "three Magi," just as he was as "Henry the Wizard." He had been the fellow-soldier of Sir Robert and Philip Sidney in the Low Countries, and the union of his eldest daughter to a friend so noble and worthy, must have been as great a satisfaction to him as the secret marriage of his younger and lighter-minded. Lucy, to James Hay, Lord Viscount Doncaster, afterwards Earl of Carlisle, one of James's

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minions, though one of the least worthless, was a mortification.1

The sisters loved each other, though the Lady Dorothy was incomparably the nobler and purer of the two. But the sisters' husbands never were and never could have been friends. With his wife's brother Algernon, afterwards the tenth Earl of Northumberland, whom Clarendon calls the greatest and proudest peer of his time, Lord Leicester lived on terms of life-long intimacy and affection. Through the two troubled Parliaments of 1621 and 1624, wherein was foreshadowed the collision of Parliamentary power and Royal prerogative which in the next reign led to civil war and the scaffold of Whitehall, he steered that middle course which commended itself to his clear calm judgment. His temperament was cautious to a fault. Lord Clarendon, after admitting his great parts and his honour and fidelity to the King, represents him as rather a speculative

1 I have condensed in Appendix a most curious and characteristic account (first published in Collins's "Sydney Papers") by the Earl, of his quarrel with his brother-in-law, at Petworth; one of the most vivid glimpses I know into the life of two hundred and fifty years ago.

than a practical man, who expected a greater certitude in the consultation of business than the business of this world is capable of, and complains of the staggering and irresolution of his nature.

In truth his reason, like that of his brotherin-law, the Earl of Northumberland, was altogether on the side of Law-and Parliament, as the framer of law-against Prerogative and the King as its interpreter, though his aversion to extremes in men and measures, and his love of retirement and study, prevented him from asserting his principles with the same distinctness, or carrying them out in practice with the same determination, as Northumberland.

In 1632, Lord Leicester (who had succeeded to the title in 1620) was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the King of Denmark, in which mission James Howell' was his secretary. Its object was partly ceremonial, to condole with the King of Denmark and Princes of Holstein, on the death of Sophia, Queen Dowager of Denmark, and mother of Anne, Queen of James I.

Author of the interesting collection of letters, so often reprinted.