Pepy's Diary. 19 Oct 1667. By and by the play begun, and in it nothing particular but a very fine dance for variety of figures, but a little too long. But, as to the contrivance, and all that was witty (which, indeed, was much, and very witty), was almost the same that had been in his two former plays of "Henry the 5th" and "Mustapha", and the same points and turns of wit in both, and in this very same play often repeated, but in excellent language, and were so excellent that the whole house was mightily pleased with it all along till towards the end he comes to discover the chief of the plot of the play by the reading of along letter, which was so long and some things (the people being set already to think too long) so unnecessary that they frequently begun to laugh, and to hiss twenty times, that, had it not been for the King's being there, they had certainly hissed it off the stage. But I must confess that, as my Lord Barkeley (age 65) says behind me, the having of that long letter was a thing so absurd, that he could not imagine how a man of his parts could possibly fall into it; or, if he did, if he had but let any friend read it, the friend would have told him of it; and, I must confess, it is one of the most remarkable instances that ever I did or expect to meet with in my life of a wise man's not being wise at all times, and in all things, for nothing could be more ridiculous than this, though the letter of itself at another time would be thought an excellent letter, and indeed an excellent Romance, but at the end of the play, when every body was weary of sitting, and were already possessed with the effect of the whole letter; to trouble them with a letter a quarter of an hour long, was a most absurd thing. After the play done, and nothing pleasing them from the time of the letter to the end of the play, people being put into a bad humour of disliking (which is another thing worth the noting), I home by coach, and could not forbear laughing almost all the way home, and all the evening to my going to bed, at the ridiculousness of the letter, and the more because my wife was angry with me, and the world, for laughing, because the King (age 37) was there, though she cannot defend the length of the letter. So after having done business at the office, I home to supper and to bed.

Life of Sir Philip Sydney by Fulke Greville Introduction. 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 1611. 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 wuth 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] favourites³ '.' 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 lease point to the time between the death of 'Henry IV of France⁴ in 1610 and that of the Earl of Salisbury in 1612⁵, 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,

Note 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.

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

Note 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. Ixx.

Note 4. Cp. p. 31.

Note 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.