ABSTRACT
As a coda to his laudatory account of Sir Henry Sidney, his secretary Edmund Molyneux commended the ‘manie rare gifts, singular vertues, and other ornaments both of mind and bodie’ of Sir Philip and gave details of his diplomatic experience and (in the first passage below) of Arcadia. (There is no way of telling which version or versions Molyneux had seen.) This account was ‘brought and delivered to the impression’, the writer then explains, ‘before there was either speech, or could be imagination
of his fatall end’. Having heard the news, Molyneux inserted a longer tribute to the younger Sidney’s deeds and virtues, including the second and third passages printed below. That later generations would value Sidney more for Arcadia than for a (now lost) ‘large epistle…in verie pure and eloquent Latine’ or for his skill in inventing appropriate ‘devices’ would perhaps have surprised Molyneux; it is interesting, however, that he does in the earlier passage, while nodding in the direction of dismissal of Arcadia as ‘a mere fansie, toie, and fiction’, consider it worthy of such high praise and so prominent a position among the deeds and virtues of the Sidneys.
