Fire and hearth Book

Still trying to read the things I was supposed to read in school and didn't. Sir Philip Sidney spent most of his life being groomed to be the perfect courtier for Elizabeth I; but because she took offense at some youthful comments, and because she had many problems with his family, she spent years never preferring him. Eventually he despaired of ever being a credit to his country or his family, and he spent four years writing "trifles"--the defense of poesie, the first sonnet sequence in English (Astrophil and Stella) and a prose work--Arcadia--which for the next 250 years would be the most popular prose work in English. He was finally called to fight the Spanish in the Netherlands, was wounded in a skirmish, and died an excruciating three weeks later at the age of 32. By poesie he meant roughly what we would call fiction, not necessarily verse, and his defense of it as preferable to philosophy and history is very spirited. And it certainly suits my prejudices. His writing is always clear and forceful--how's this for the importance of wide reading and study?--"This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it com forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate soules, made worse by theyr clayey lodgings, can be capable of."