1752 (Glasgow), by Lord Thurlow in 1810, by Professor Arber in 1868, and by Mr. E. S. Shuckburgh in 1891.
Sidney's translation of the Psalms, in which his sister joined him, was long circulated in manuscript, and manuscript copies are numerous (cf. Bodl. Rawlinson MS., Poet. 25; Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 12047–8; and manuscript in Trin. Coll. Cambridge). Donne wrote a fine poem in praise of the work (cf. Poems, 1633; cf. Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, p. 15). It was first printed in 1823 by Robert Triphook under the editorship of Samuel Weller Singer [q. v.], from a manuscript in the handwriting of John Davies of Hereford, then in the possession of B. H. Bright, but now at Penshurst. The title ran: ‘The Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kindes of Verse, more rare and excellent for the Method and Variety than ever yet hath been done in English. Begun by the noble and learned gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt., and finished by the right honorable the Countess of Pembroke, his sister.’ The first forty-three psalms are, according to notes in the manuscript, alone by Sidney. The metres are very various. Psalm xxxvii is an early example of that employed by Tennyson in ‘In Memoriam.’ Sidney's renderings enjoyed the advantage of republication with discursive commentary by Mr. Ruskin; Mr. Ruskin's edition of them forms the second volume of his ‘Bibliotheca Pastorum,’ 1877, and bears the sub-title of ‘Rock Honey-comb.’ Sidney's paraphrase, according to Mr. Ruskin, ‘aims straight, and with almost fiercely fixed purpose, at getting into the heart and truth of the thing it has got to say; and unmistakably, at any cost of its own dignity, explaining that to the hearer, shrinking from no familiarity and restricting itself from no expansion in terms, that will make the thing meant clearer’ (Pref. p. xvii).
One of Sidney's poetic works is lost. When William Ponsonby obtained a license for the publication of the ‘Arcadia’ on 23 Sept. 1588, he also secured permission to print ‘a translation of Salust de Bartas done by the same Sr P. into englishe.’ Greville mentioned in his letter to Walsingham that Sidney had executed this translation; and Florio, when dedicating the second book of his translation of Montaigne (1603) to Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland, and to Sidney's friend, Lady Rich, notes that he had seen Sidney's rendering of ‘the first septmane of that arch-poet Du Bartas,’ and entreats the ladies to give it to the world. Nothing further is known of it.
All Sidney's extant poetry was collected by Dr. Grosart in 1873 (new edit. 1877). The editor includes, besides the sonnets, songs, poems from the ‘Arcadia,’ and the psalms, two ‘pastoralls’ from Davison's ‘Poetical Rhapsody;’ ‘Affection's Snare,’ from Rawlinson MS. Poet. 84; and ‘Wooing-stuffe,’ from ‘Cottoni Posthuma’ (p. 327), where it is appended to a short prose essay, ‘Valour Anatomized,’ doubtfully assigned to Sidney.
[The chief original sources of information are the finely eulogistic life of Sidney by his friend Fulke Greville, which was first published in 1652, and is mainly a sketch of character and of opinions; the papers and letters (with memoir) printed in Collins's Sydney Papers (1746, fol., i. 98–113, and passim) from the originals preserved at Penshurst (cf. Hist. MSS. Comm. 3rd Rep. iii. 227—account of manuscripts at Penshurst); and the Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, collected and translated from the Latin, with notes and a memoir of Sidney by Steuart A. Pears [q. v.], London, 1845. Languet's Epistolæ in Latin were published by Lord Hailes in 1776. The fullest modern biography is that by Mr. H. R. Fox Bourne, which was first published in 1862, and was reissued in a revised form in 1891 in the ‘Heroes of the Nation’ series. The latter volume practically supersedes, as far as the facts go, the lives by Thomas Zouch (1809); by Julius Lloyd (1862); and by J. A. Symonds in ‘Men of Letters’ series (1886). (Cf. Anna M. Stoddart's Philip Sidney, Servant of God, 1894.) Hunter's MS. Chorus Vatum in Addit. MS. 24490, pp. 1–24, collects many details respecting the contemporary elegies. Other useful authorities are: Sidneiana, being a collection of fragments relative to Sir Philip Sidney, knt., by Samuel Butler, bishop of Lichfield [q. v.] (Roxburghe Club), London, 1837; Dr. Grosart's Introductions to the Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 2 vols., 1873; Dr. Edward Flügel's careful introduction to his edition of Astrophel and Stella and Defence of Poesie, Halle, 1889; Wood's Athenæ, ed. Bliss, i. 525 seq.; Morley's English Writers, vol. ix.; Arber's English Garner, i. 467–600; Dunlop's Hist. of Fiction, ed. Wilson; Jusserand's English Novel, Engl. transl. 1890; Courthope's Hist. of English Poetry, ii. 202–33.]
SIDNEY, PHILIP, third Earl of Leicester (1619–1698), eldest son of Robert, second earl of Leicester [q. v.], born in January 1619, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, on 26 July 1634 (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, i. 1449). Lord Lisle, as he was styled from 1626 to 1677, accompanied his father on his embassy to Denmark in 1632, and on his embassy to France in 1636. In the second Scottish war he commanded the cuirassiers who formed the bodyguard of his uncle, the Earl of
