[In the following essay, Smith offers an overview of the publication history of Greville's study of Sidney, along with a critical evaluation of this work.]

Sir Philip Sidney is so familiar and so attractive a name, and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, so little known outside the libraries of scholars, that the book which is here republished requires a word or two of introduction for the reader who is not already versed in the subject. It was first published in 1652, twenty-four years after its author's death; and the title, The Life of the renowned Sir Philip Sidney (with other matters; see the title-page), was given to it presumably by the unknown P. B., the editor, certainly not by Greville himself. In a manuscript copy of the work, of which we shall hear more hereafter, the title is simply ‘A Dedication’; and Greville's primary object was to dedicate his poems, ‘these exercises of my youth,’ as he calls them, ‘to that Worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed.’ The Dedication spreads out, in the unchannelled abundance of our earlier prose and the retired soliloquizing of Greville's older age, into a ‘Treatise’, in which the primary object is clean forgotten in the rush of the writer's memory of those two subjects of so much greater importance, his friend, Sir Philip, and his mistress, Queen Elizabeth. The treatise is indeed our first authority for some of the well-known stories of Sidney, notably that of the cup of water at Zutphen, and that of the quarrel with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court (Greville, however, does not give the earl's name); but it is at once much less and much more than a regular biography of Sidney. There are no dates, no details of personal appearance, place of abode, habits, friends and acquaintances; nothing of marriage; scarcely anything of life at court; nothing even of Sidney's literary pursuits, except an interesting criticism of the Arcadia solely from the point of view of the political philosopher.

Here, in fact, we have the matter in a nutshell. In all that he writes, except the love poems of the series named Caelica, Greville writes as a political philosopher and moralist. Even in Caelica the thinker dominates the lover, and often banishes the artist: the rest of the poems, including the plays, are, even avowedly (cp. Life of Sidney, chs. 14 and 18), political philosophy in verse. The bulk of them are called ‘Treatises’—a Treatise of Religion; a Treatie of Humane Learning; an Inquisition upon Fame and Honour; a Treatise of Monarchy, which is divided into ‘sections’ with such titles as ‘Of weak-minded Tyrants’, ‘Cautions against these weak extremities,’ ‘Of Lawes,’ ‘Of Commerce.’ These treatises ‘were first intended’, Greville writes (Sidney, ch. 14), ‘to be for every act [in the Tragedies] a chorus’: but ‘with humble sayles after I had once ventured upon this spreading Ocean of Images, my apprehensive youth [i.e. youth which naturally grasps at whatever it sees], for lack of a well touched compasse, did easily wander beyond proportion’. The tragedies themselves were political, especially the one which Greville destroyed, Antonie and Cleopatra, ‘many members in that creature (by the opinion of those few eyes which saw it) having some childish wantonnesse in them, apt enough to be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors and government.’ The object in all three of them was ‘to trace out the high waies of ambitious Governours, and to shew in the practice, that the more audacity, advantage, and good successe such Soveraignties have, the more they hasten to their owne desolation and ruine’ (ch. 18). Similarly very much the greater part of the Life of Sidney consists of reflections upon the political problems of Elizabeth's reign, upon Sidney's views on this subject, upon Elizabeth's methods of government. Greville, like Sidney and Drake and most of the ‘stirring Spirits’ (ch. 8) of that time, was strongly anti-Spanish and anti-Papal. His denunciations of Spanish ambition and Papal subservience are so persistent that only the abundance and the quaintness of his language save them from becoming monotonous. There can be little doubt that part of the scorn and displeasure, with which in his later years he alludes, in terms however general, to the degeneracy of the times, was due to his memory of the days of his early manhood, when the struggle with Spain worked together with the commercial enterprise, fostered by the discovery of the New World and the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance, to give a zest to political life, which was more and more lacking in the reign of James I, and even in the last years of Elizabeth herself. Not that Greville was ever, in all probability, a very light-hearted optimist or an adventurous man of action. One pictures him as usually throwing his influence on the side of prudence in his relations with his two more brilliant friends and kinsmen, Sidney¹ and, afterwards, the rash and unfortunate Essex. His own career, too, was that of a man who was more apt to fill useful and more or less lucrative employments and to steer clear of the extremes of partisanship than to put his fortune to the touch in any daring scheme of ambition. He had his strong sympathies, and they were not with the Cecils²; but he had no open breach with them, and he filled various posts while they still lived, though he evidently blossomed out again in his old age after the Earl of Salisbury's death in 1612. The following pages will show that he was genuinely devoted to Queen Elizabeth; and it is clear that she regarded him with favour as a courtier who could be trusted. He started his political career with offices in the principality of Wales, of which his friend's father, Sir Henry Sidney, was Lord President. He received various grants of land and emoluments, was knighted in 1597, and made Treasurer of Marine Causes in 1599-1600. Bacon records that ‘Sir Fulke Grevill had much and private access to Queen Elizabeth, which he used honourably, and did many men good: yet he would say merrily of himself “That he was like Robin Goodfellow: for when the maids spilt the milk-pans or kept any racket, they would lay it upon Robin: so what tales the ladies about the Queen told her, or other bad offices that they did, they would put it upon him”’. Whatever they said about him, he was, as another writer tells us, ‘a constant courtier of the ladies’; and the fact that he never married no doubt contributed to his having ‘the longest lease and the smoothest time, without rub, of any of her [Elizabeth's] favourites’.³ In the second year of James I he was granted Warwick Castle, then a ruin, which he made into the splendid pile which it still remains. Internal evidence and the probabilities of the case point to the time between the death of Henry IV of France⁴ in 1610 and that of the Earl of Salisbury in 1612,⁵ as that in which the so-called Life of Sidney was composed. Soon after the later of these two dates Greville was made Under-Treasurer, and then Chancellor of the Exchequer (1614), a Privy Councillor, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. In 1620 he was created Lord Brooke of Beauchamps-Court; and the Calendars of State Papers show that in spite of his advanced age—‘Age and sickness, the gentlemen ushers of death,’ as he writes with regard to himself in 1625⁶—he was an active member of the House of Lords and of the administration. A long letter which he wrote to the Duke of Buckingham in 1623, reads like a piece of the Life of Sidney: the ambition and intrigues of Spain and the Papacy are denounced in the same picturesque language. Lord Brooke lived on into the reign of Charles I. On Sept. 1, 1628, he was stabbed in the back by a body-servant, Mr. Ralph Haywood, who was apparently enraged by being unmentioned in his master's will, and who ‘to consummate the Tragedy, went into another roome, and having lock't the dore, pierced his own bowells with a sword’.⁷ A contemporary lampoon gives the dead Lord Brooke a bad character for avarice—a vice which was perhaps never more in vogue than in the days of the Tudors, when the confiscation of religious property and the exploitation of the New World whetted the thirst for gold. And Greville was conspicuously one of the new nobility, which built its fortunes, its Warwick castles and Beauchamps-Courts, out of the ruins of the mediaeval baronage and the mediaeval Church. But whatever were the rights of his difference with his servant, the antiquaries Camden and Speed, and the poet Daniel and others bear witness to his generosity as a patron of letters; and he endowed a chair of History at Cambridge, showing his Puritan tendencies⁸ and causing much displeasure to Laud, by appointing the Dutch scholar, Isaac Dorislaus, to be the first professor. He died on Sept. 30, 1628, and was buried in a monument of black and white marble which he had erected in his lifetime, in the Collegiate Church of the Virgin at Warwick, with the inscription: ‘Fulke Grevil, Servant to Queene Elizabeth, Councellor to King James, and Frend to S^r Philip Sydney. Trophaeum Peccati.’

As an historical document the so-called Life of Sidney is of considerable importance; and for that reason I have spent great pains on supplying, by means of accurate notes of a somewhat dry and forbidding appearance, the materials for arriving as closely as may be at the words which the author actually wrote. This ought to have been unnecessary, as the late Dr. Grosart professed and doubtless intended to do the same. Lovers of literature, who happen to have scholarly instincts and training, can never speak of enthusiastic antiquaries like Dr. Grosart without compunction. On the one hand they admire the generous expenditure of time and money which Dr. Grosart gave to his many ‘labours of love’. On the other hand they can only look aghast on the mass of inaccurate statements and worthless judgements which swell the undigested bulk of his editions. The gratitude which they are anxious to feel as they enter into the fruits of his labour is thwarted by the double labour which they have to expend in correcting his mistakes and verifying the rest of his statements. I should have preferred to do the work of correction tacitly, but unfortunately Dr. Grosart had another failing, which is not however confined to the unscholarly amateur of letters. He had a mistaken confidence in his own merits, and an absurd way of expressing it by belittling those of his predecessors. Thus he speaks of the only other reprint of the Life of Sidney besides his own, which was executed by Sir Egerton Brydges at his Lee Priory Press in 1816, as ‘exceptionally slovenly and unworthy’. This is the very reverse of the truth.⁹ Again, having the opportunity of being the first to publish the Life according to a MS. copy of it existing in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, he exalts that MS. to a pinnacle of excellence upon the strength of a collation not made by himself,¹⁰ and pursues the text as hitherto printed with a ceaseless stream of ‘P grossly misprints’, ‘P misreads.’ He makes no attempt to weigh the comparative value of M (i.e. the MS. at Trinity College) and P (the printed text of 1652). He seems in a vague way to have regarded M as the source of P, which it certainly was not; but he does not even report the readings of the two texts correctly nor apparently pay the least regard to the sense as a guide to his choice between them where they are in conflict.¹¹ The character of his critical work will be sufficiently evident from the notes at the end of this volume. I have felt bound to be outspoken on the subject; but I have spoken with reluctance, and I should like to end by saying that, with all its faults, Grosart's edition of Lord Brooke's Works has the great merit of bringing together a body of writings both in prose and verse which well deserved to be revived for lovers of literature.

The textual criticism of the Life of Sidney is a problem, or rather part of a problem,¹² which I have not had time or opportunity thoroughly to attempt to solve. By the hospitality of Dr. Henry Jackson and the kind permission of the authorities of Trinity College I was able to make a collation of M at Cambridge; and I have quoted its readings wherever they seemed to be of the least importance, whether as improving the text or as throwing light upon the divergence between M and P. The differences of reading are very numerous, and vary from minute details to serious discrepancies. The most interesting places are naturally those where M contains matter which is absent from P.¹³ One of these¹⁴ is especially interesting because it contains a sort of palinode to a somewhat unfavourable account of Sir Francis Drake, and from the words with which it is introduced (‘Yet to deale trulie with the dead’) would, if there were not abundant evidence to the contrary, tempt one to suppose that the bulk of the Life was written before Drake's death in Jan. 1595/6. Only one degree less interesting are the passages omitted by M, but contained in P,¹⁵ since these prove that the omissions of P, just spoken of, are not due to a negligent copying of M or its archetype. Thirdly, among the mass of differences which have only an importance as textual evidence, there are a few curious variae lectiones,¹⁶ which seem, together with the omissions and insertions, to prove that M and P represent two different recensions of the text made, in all probability,¹⁷ by the author himself. Both M and P have a good many mistakes which arise from the inattention of the scribe or the compositor, and others due to inability to decipher their originals. Considering the practice of amateurs of literature in those days to circulate their compositions among their friends without having them printed, there is nothing surprising in the fact that M and P must be derived from different versions: and I cannot at present, even if it is not now an insoluble question, determine which version has the better claim to represent the author's summa manus.

Nor is the problem one of greater importance than textual problems are apt to be. Any scientific investigation is fascinating to the investigator; and any increase in the accurate knowledge of an author's text is not without its value. But this treatise of Greville's is not one of the rare books in which the restoration of a desperate text is the indispensable preliminary to an intelligent reading of the work. I have attempted, if I may combine metaphors somewhat after Greville's own manner, to kill two birds with one stone in this edition; but I do not wish to fall between two stools. Though I hope I have done something for the student who may wish to use Greville's treatise as an historical document, my chief desire is that lovers of literature may share the pleasure which it gives me to wander in the ‘careless-ordered garden’ of this old Elizabethan moralist, to be stirred by his meditative eloquence, to fill the ear with his noble rhythms, to please the fancy with his luxuriant images and metaphors, and to find a zest even in tracking his meaning through his devious syntax. For Greville in his prose, as in his verse, is an obscure writer, even for the days before Hobbes and Dryden. The general trend of his argument is clear enough, and the colours of his ‘map’ of European politics (to use a favourite word of his) have the freshness of the first-hand observer, even though the lines are sometimes drawn with the wavering hand of memory. But in detail he is often very difficult. Now and again this is due to some defect in the transmission of the text. More often the cause is the punctuation, which follows no consistent system and yet is, as a rule, the result of deliberate intention. But the vagaries of Greville's punctuation are really part of the irregular character of his style; and his style means his thought, for, though he loves quaint metaphors and similes, he is no mere verbal acrobat, nor is his bewildering syntax a work of affectation.¹⁸ He luxuriates in words, phrases, metaphors, allusions, like all the Elizabethans¹⁹; one picturesque expression trips over another; an epithet suggests a new turn of thought, and the sentence cannot keep up with the sudden shifting of the course. At the same time he usually retains in his own mind the thread of his argument, and comes back to it, in spite of intervening stops and subjects, with an unconscious abruptness which bewilders the reader unless he holds on to the thread very fast. The same characteristics mark Greville's poetry. It is full of good things—strong phrases, pointed apophthegms, quaint and suggestive metaphors and allusions; but even more than in the prose, certainly with a more deterrent effect upon the reader who expects to find a poem in the first place a work of art, grammar and proportion are constantly forgotten. But although one cannot help seeing in Greville, as in other minds which, though acute and even deep, are yet not of the first order of power, that want of perfect control which soon produces the exaggeration, the paradox, the verbal juggling and fantastic imagery of a decadent style like that of the ‘metaphysical’ poets, in Greville himself neither failings nor virtues are the stereotyped characteristics of a ‘school’ or a ‘style’. His first interest is in the thoughts which he wants to express; and it is for this reason that his expression, however faulty, has the charm of sincerity, and gives one an idea of originality of mind. The impression is deepened by a somewhat sardonic humour which plays with similarities of sound or contrasts of sense, a sort of punning without elaboration or finish, but suggestive sometimes of contempt, sometimes of a certain restrained passion. Finally, and for the second time, in spite of, and often in the midst of, his oracular obscurity, Greville is often touched by moral and intellectual passion to a fine nobility of utterance, and in these passages he haunts the ear with that solemn and rich and varied rhythm which is the peculiar glory of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. I know few chapters in any book of a more sustained meditative eloquence than the third of this treatise, and few passages of finer rhythm than the last paragraph of that chapter.

Notes

1. Cp. p. 74, where Greville relates how he inspired ‘that ingenuous spirit of Sir Philip's’ with suspicion of Drake's whole-heartedness in their projected enterprise.

2. Cp. pp. 217 foll., and the story of the fall of Essex, pp. 156 foll.

3. Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1642), p. 30: quoted, with the passage from Bacon (Spedding, vii, p. 158), by Grosart, Lord Brooke's Works, vol. i, p. lxx.

4. Cp. p. 31.

5. From the manner in which Salisbury is spoken of on pp. 217-9, combined with the absence of any allusion to his death, I think it probable that he was still alive when the treatise was written. The fact that Greville's tragedy Mustapha was, perhaps piratically, published in 1609, may have some significance in connexion with the date of the Dedication of his poems to the memory of Sidney.

6. Grosart, vol. iv, p. 320.

7. Dugdale's Warwickshire, pp. 571-3; much the same account of Greville is given by Dugdale in his Baronage, vol. ii, pp. 442-3. These passages form the main source of information about Greville's career. The facts are given more fully and with much comment of doubtful value in Dr. Grosart's Memorial-Introduction, Lord Brooke's Works, vol i.

8. Greville's strong sympathy with the Reformation is always coming out; for one decisive passage cp. below, pp. 216-7.

9. I speak from an examination of the book: but I also notice with satisfaction that Mr. Sidney Lee in his account of Greville in the Dict. Nat. Biog. speaks of Sir Egerton Brydges' reprint being done ‘with much care’.

10. The collation was made by Mr. W. Aldis Wright: Grosart, vol. i, p. xii; vol. iv, p. vii.

11. Perhaps the most glaring of Grosart's editorial faults, if we consider the slavish way in which he follows M in impossible readings, is his omission to record superior readings of his idol; cp. notes on p. 10, l. 9; p. 18, l. 4 from bot.; p. 78, l. 4; p. 83, par. 2, l. 4 from bot.; p. 87, par. 2, l. 1; p. 95, par. 2, l. 9, & c.

12. MSS. of nearly all Greville's writings exist at Warwick Castle, and were collated by Grosart.

13. See notes on p. 77, end of par. 2; p. 89, ditto; p. 132, ll. 11-13.

14. p. 77.

15. See notes on p. 53, l. 12; p. 84, par. 3, l. 7; p. 91, l. 6; p. 97, l. 4 from bot.

16. See especially notes on p. 106, l. 3 from bot.; p. 108, l. 8; p. 115, l. 5.

17. Any other supposition is, in the first place, fantastic. In the second place, there exist at Warwick Castle, MSS. of Greville's other works, partly in his own handwritting, partly in a scribe's, but with corrections in Greville's, and all of them containing many readings different from the printed texts.

18. Motley several times speaks of Greville as a ‘euphuist’, but this much-abused term is not in any important degree applicable to Greville.

19. Every one knows that the language of the Elizabethans is surcharged with metaphor; but nowhere, except perhaps in Bacon's Essays, are the metaphors and similes more abundant than in Greville. Many of his images are very vivid. They occur on every page, but a few of the more striking are p. 66, l. 7; p. 74, l. 3 from bot.; p. 86, l. 5; p. 94, l. 3; p. 108, l. 5 from bot.; p. 167, l. 5 and 5 from bot.; p. 179, l. 7 from bot.; p. 212, l. 6 from bot.; p. 224, l. 7. Some of the words of which Greville is especially fond are ‘selfnesse’, ‘wind-blown,’ ‘to wave,’ ‘rack,’ ‘map,’ ‘noun-adjective-natured,’ ‘undertaker,’ and others to which attention is called in the notes on the text. He is also fond of such phrases as ‘contented and contenting’ (p. 197), ‘successive and successful’ (p. 209), ‘the blessed and blessing presence of this unmatchable Queen and woman’ (p. 215).