Books: Elizabethan Paragon

ASTROPHEL—Alfred H. Bill—Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50). ~

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

—T. S. Eliot Permitted to meet the 350-year-old ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, most moderns would aim chiefly at finding out: 1) how in his own lifetime that Elizabethan poet-statesman-soldier acquired his extraordinary fame, and 2) why. despite the fact that his prose (Arcadia, Defence of Poesie) and poetry (Astrophel and Stella) are today practically unread and unreadable, and his career no more...