throne in captivity; he foments rebellion by appeals to the malcontents; he pretends to have at heart only the safety and best interests of the kingdom. In his strategy he follows the rules also: he pays attention to his citadel, his supplies, his selection of the men who are to be nearest him, making use even of their vices. In the jousts, characterized as they are by an outward courtesy, he is the seeker for renown in order to make an impression on others, as laid down in the twenty-first chapter of Il Principe.

Sidney shares the feeling of his time that a wise monarchy is the true form of government. His attack on oligarchy as being the cause of the worst of tyrannies prefaces the story of the wise Evarchus: "For they having the power of kings, but not the nature of kings, used the authority as men do their farms."1 Democracy is no less impossible. The story of the giants of Pontus suggests Spenser's allegorical method. The two chief instances, however, of Sidney's distrust of the commons are found in the account of the rebellion against Basilius and in the depicting, near the end of the story, of the anarchy resulting from the supposed death of the king. In the first of these Zelmane (Pyrocles) asks the rebels what they want, and the confused replies indicate Sidney's conviction that popular rule would bring anarchy.1

All these illustrations, however, are merely supplements to that which is the central theme in Sidney's treatment of the Prince: the contrast between Evarchus, the wise prince, and Basilius, king in name only. One of the most eloquent passages in the book is that in which the author paints, in Evarchus, his ideal monarch. Coming to the throne when his kingdom was prostrated by tyranny, he was compelled at first to command respect by severity. After he was firmly established, "then shined forth indeede all love among them, when an awful feare, ingendred by justice, did make that love most lovely.” He lived the life he wished his people to live, and lived it among them, not apart from them; he did not regard their persons and their property as instruments for his own pleasure, for "while by force he took nothing, by their love

1 Arcadia, II, vi.

2 Arcadia, II, ix.

On this compare Elyot, I, ii, and The Courtier, Book IV.

The giants represent a mistreated populace, useful to a wise prince, but a source of danger made greater through their ignorance.

3 Arcadia, II, xxv, xxvi. It should be stated that I have confined my investigation to that part of Arcadia which is indubitably Sidney's. The second passage (ed. Baker, pp. 564 ff.), though it comes in the portion revised by the Countess of Pembroke, bears the marks of having been written by Sir Philip.

The passage is too long to quote, but the suggestions for tariff reform, change of administration, public improvements, reduction of the high cost of living, the desire of each class for a reduction in all products other than its own, all remind one of the political campaign of 1912; while the blind confidence in a large number of statutes as necessary to the welfare of the state is preeminently American. Less pleasant because of its betrayal of Sidney's aristocratic contempt for the mob, though it is good fun, is his ridicule of the butchers, tailors, and millers, together with the account of the artist, ancestor of the modern war correspondent, who was to paint the battle of the Centaurs and rushed to the fray in search of local color. He got it. Arcadia, II, vi.

he had all."1 "In summe I might as easily sette downe the whole Arte of government, as to lay before your eyes the picture of his proceedings." Contrasted with this ideal is the course of life pursued by Basilius. The significance of this central idea of the book is not that Sidney wished to portray an ideal life away from the conventionality of the court, but the disasters that come upon a nation when its sovereign, fearful of fate, retires to solitude in an effort to avoid it. Kalander's account of Arcadia: the solid qualities of its people, their love for Basilius, the respect in which the nation was held by neighboring peoples, the peace that encouraged happiness and invited the Muses, all this is sharply contrasted with the evils that follow. The letter of Philanax warns the king against superstition and points out the consequences of his retirement. The rest of the main plot shows how these prophecies came true. The king is the prey to flatterers like Clinias and base upstarts like Dametas; the rebellion of the commons is due to the practices. of those who seek to profit by the king's seeming cowardice; lust rules his own life; the people are torn by factions so that Cecropia and Amphialus bring about civil war; utter chaos results, and the larger duties of Basilius to aid Evarchus in repelling hostile nations are neglected. Philanax sums up the indictment when he tells Basilius that his whole duty, as a Prince and the father of a people, is "with the eye of wisdome, the hand of fortitude, and the bart of justice to set downe all private conceits in comparison of what for the publike is profitable."3 Over against this is set, in the closing pages of the story, the nobility of Evarchus, strengthening his people against expected attack; seeking to form alliances among other nations against a common enemy; going to Arcadia to try to withdraw its prince from burying himself alive; and with calm justice dooming his own son to death in his effort to bring to an end the anarchy he found there.

Thus Fulke Greville spoke with full knowledge in saying that Sidney intended more than idle amusement in his story. Corroborative evidence is found in his account of the conversations between the two friends, and in Sidney's correspondence with Languet. Sidney, we are told, complained of the "neglect" of the Queen in her failure to use the Huguenots as a means of checking the increasing Spanish aggression; it was "an omission in that excellent Ladies Government" that Austria "gained the fame of action, trained up his owne Instruments martially, and got credit with his fellowbordering Princes," a condition that came through a "remiss looking on "; a yet greater oversight was characteristic of England and France, because "while their Princes stood at gaze, as upon things far off, they still gave way for the Popish and Spanish invisible arts and counsels to undermine the greatness and freedom both of Secular and Ecclesiastical Princes." "In this

1 Compare the object lesson, on the subject of riches, taught by Cyrus to Croesus, Cyropaedia, VIII, ii. 2 Arcadia, II, iv. 3 Ibid., III, xix. This is just what Sidney told the Queen in 1580.

survey of forrain Nations," we are told, "he observed a fatal passivenesse generally currant, by reason of strange inequalities between little humors and great fortunes in the present Princes reigning." In this "fatal passiveness," due as it was to "little humors" of those who should be alert, we have the keynote to the interpretation of the story of Basilius. The testimony of the correspondence with Languet is not less explicit : Sidney expresses impatience with the delays and intrigues of Elizabeth and Burghley; our princes," he says, "are enjoying too deep a slumber; nevertheless, while they indulge in this repose, I would have them beware that they fall not into that malady in which death itself goes hand in hand with its counterpart." 2 At the very time when he was working on his book, Sidney was in disgrace because he had addressed a letter to the Queen protesting against the proposed French marriage. It is this sloth, this foolish fear of fate, this wasting of time in amorous toying while factions were multiplying and plots against the throne grew ripe, that the Basilius story shows forth. Sidney does not hold up the pastoral life of Basilius as a model; he does not find in it an admirable withdrawal from the cares of life; it is no idyllic existence in the forest of Arden, but a criminal evading of responsibility that will bring ruin to any state." Sidney's book, concrete application of the theories of the province of poetry laid down in his Defense, springing out of his interest in the problems of government, the object of his care during the ripest and most thoughtful years of his life, is less truly to be described as a pastoral romance than as an "historical fiction," a prose counterpart of the Faerie Queene, having for its object "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," and to portray a good governour and a vertuous man. That this intention was not vaguely moral, but was intended by Sidney to apply to political conditions in his own time and to the crisis that he saw was coming upon England, I shall seek to show more fully in another place.

1 Life, Caradoc Press Reprint, 1907, pp. 18 ff.

2 Pears, pp. 58-59.

3 Even the oracle which led Basilius to leave his duties in order, as he thought, to avoid the loss of his kingdom, finds a counterpart in Elizabeth's superstitious regard for nativities and portents. (Cf. Aikin, Memoirs, II, 27.) As to the unpleasantness of that part of Arcadia which deals with the lust of Basilius and Gynecia, about which much has been written, we have merely a representation of what the author believes will happen when princes lead slothful lives, with perhaps a reference to immoral and unnatural conditions at Elizabeth's court. Compare Spenser's stinging castigation of these conditions in Colin Clout, lines 664 ff., in which he shows the pettiness and selfish hollowness of the court, and makes a similar distinction between pure love as understood by the "shepherds" and the licentious talk of the courtiers on " love, and love, and love my dear." This gallantry, filled with "lewd speeches and licentious deeds," profanes the mighty mysteries of Love. Compare also Languet's letter to Sidney, written soon after a visit to London: "To speak plainly, the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those virtues which are wholesome to the state" (Pears, p. 167). I have given other evidence of these conditions in my discussion of the relations between Spenser and Leicester (Publications of the Modern Language Association, September, 1910).

ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC IN CHAUCER'S

FRANKLIN'S TALE

JOHN STRONG PERRY TATLOCK

Dorigen, pining by the Breton shore for her husband Arveragus, absent in England, has fallen into a melancholy, a "derke fantasye," which is only increased by the means she takes to relieve it; she cannot look out on the sea over which he must return to her without seeing the grisly fiendly black rocks lying out along the coast, and without thinking of the perils of shipwreck and striving to see through a thicker cloud than the Breton haze, the mystery of evil. Even though her friends try to divert her in a charming inland garden, the menacing rocks seem to be still before her eyes. When the squire Aurelius has revealed his love to her, and she playfully casts about for a gentler way of rejecting him than her first flat refusal, she promises to be his when he shall have removed every stone from the coast of Brittany. He, like many another lover in mediæval romance, attempts neither to forget nor to content her, but takes to his bed; till his more practical brother at last, after the husband's return, bethinks him how by the aid of magic Aurelius may keep the word of promise to her eye and break it to her hope. He fetches an old college mate from Orleans, through whose skill in magic the rocks vanish for a week or two. Thus by a brilliant stroke of dramatic irony✓ the very means Dorigen has taken to rid herself forever of her unwelcome suitor is what puts her helpless in his power, and the very task which her anxious fidelity to her husband has led her to choose threatens to become the cause of her unwilling infidelity. It is only through the rare generosity of her lover, stimulated by that of her husband, that she saves her honor as a wife without prejudice to the honor of her word.

In this tale astrology and magic are more essential than in any other of Chaucer's works except the Squire's Tale and the Complaint of Mars, and are used with more evident familiarity 1 than anywhere else except in the latter and in the treatise on the astrolabe. Everything hinges on the achievement of a feat of which the lover himself can only say despairingly, when it is proposed,

"This were an inpossible."

Since Chaucer has set the poem in pagan times, he might have ascribed the marvel to the power of a divinity, but characteristically of his later manner

1 It is curious to notice how astrology and its terms were in Chaucer's mind all through the poem: cf. ll. 781, 1033, 1057-1058 (and Skeat's note), 1067-1068, 1246.