his pupil Edmund Spenser to Sidney's notice, and to the notice of Sidney's uncle, Leicester. At the end of 1578 Spenser was Leicester's guest in London at Leicester House, and there Sidney frequently met him. Sir Edward Dyer [q. v.], a court acquaintance of Sidney, shared his affection for literature, and he, too, spent much time with Spenser at Leicester House. On 16 Oct. 1579 the poet wrote to Harvey: ‘The two worthy gentlemen, Mr. Sidney and Mr. Dyer, have me, I thank them, at some use in familiarity’ (cf. Gabriel Harvey's Letterbook, Camden Soc. p. 101). Spenser's devotion to Sidney is not the least interesting testimony to the latter's versatile culture. Spenser subsequently recalled
Remembrance of that most heroic spirit
Who first my muse did lift out of the floor
To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays.
Among the complimentary verses prefixed to the first edition of the ‘Faerie Queen’ in 1590 were some by ‘W. L.,’ which reiterate Sidney's abiding influence on Spenser's literary development. At the end of 1579 Spenser dedicated to Sidney, whom he described as ‘the president of nobless and of chivalry,’ his ‘Shepherd's Calendar;’ and the editor of the volume, Edward Kirke [q. v.], wrote of Sidney as ‘a special favourer and maintainer of all kinds of learning.’ With a view to converting Sidney and his friends to his own theories of the need of naturalising the classical metres in English verse, Harvey persuaded them to form a literary society which they called the Areopagus, and they seem to have often met in London during 1579 to engage in formal literary debate. Under these influences Sidney attempted many sapphics and hexameters in English, some of which he incorporated in the ‘Arcadia.’ He commemorated such intercourse with literary friends in a poem ‘upon his meeting with his two worthy friends and fellow-poets,’ Dyer and Greville (Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, ed. Bullen, i. 32).
The drama also attracted Sidney, and he interested himself in the welfare of his uncle Leicester's company of players. In 1582 he stood godfather to the son of Richard Tarleton, who was a member of the company. When, in 1579, Stephen Gosson [q. v.] without authority dedicated to him his denunciation of playhouses, which he entitled ‘The Schoole of Abuse,’ Sidney circulated an enlightened defence of the drama in his ‘Apologie for Poetrie.’ To him, as the avowed champion of the stage, Thomas Lodge subsequently dedicated his ‘Alarum against Usurers’ (1584).
Meanwhile in the summer of 1578 Sidney received some small office about the court, and at Christmas welcomed his friend Languet, who accompanied Prince John Casimir on a visit to Elizabeth. Languet reproached Sidney with inhaling too freely the somewhat enervating atmosphere of the court. But Sidney's independence of character unfitted him for the permanent rôle of courtier. During the summer of 1579 he was often absent while superintending on behalf of his father the enlargement of Penshurst, and in August he experienced the fickleness of the favour of the queen, who extended to him the anger with which she received the news of Leicester's secret marriage with the Countess of Essex. In September Sidney was forced into a personal quarrel which gave him a further distaste for court life. While he was playing tennis at Whitehall, the Earl of Oxford came in uninvited and joined in the game. Sidney politely raised objections. The earl bade all the players leave the court, and when Sidney protested the earl called him a puppy. Sidney gave him the lie direct. ‘Puppies,’ he quietly retorted, ‘are gotten by dogs, and children by men.’ But the earl ignored the insult, and it was left to Sidney to send him a challenge. The dispute reached the queen's ears, and she forbade a duel; but Sidney declined to act upon the queen's suggestion that he owed the earl an apology on the ground of his superior rank. Early in January 1580 he incurred the queen's wrath anew. He sent her an elaborate treatise condemning her proposed marriage with the Duke of Anjou. It was a vehemently worded appeal to the queen's patriotism and protestant zeal (Sydney Papers, i. 287–92). For some months Sidney was excluded from her presence. Retiring to Wilton, or, according to Aubrey, to the neighbouring village of Ivychurch, he engaged with his sister in literary work. Jointly they versified the psalms, and for her amusement he wrote his ‘Arcadia,’ a romance in prose with interludes of verse. To the same period may doubtless be referred his poem in ‘dispraise of a courtly life’ (Davison, Poetical Rhapsody, ed. Bullen, i. 34).
On 18 Oct. 1580 Sidney was at Leicester House, and thence addressed to his younger brother Robert, who was travelling abroad, an elaborate letter of counsel, in which he sketched a sensible method of studying history (Sydney Papers, i. 283–5; reprinted in Profitable Instructions for Travellers, 1633). At the end of October Sidney had returned to court, apparently after promising to abstain from protests against the French marriage. Money was still scarce with him, and, with
