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Sidney Sussex College

a college at Cambridge, England. It began as the Franciscan or Grey Friar's House, established in 1240, and after the Reformation was endowed as a school by the will of Lady Frances Sidney, Countess Dowager of Sussex. Its early career is marked by Puritanism and Irish and Scotch students were first conspicuous in ter and ten fellows, twenty-four scholars, and about seventy undergraduates. It has eight livings in its gift. Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fuller, and Bramhall were among the members.

SIDNEY, or SYDNEY, ALGERNON, an English military officer; born in Penshurst, Kent, in 1622. He accompanied his father, the 2d Earl of Leicester, in his embassies to Denmark and France. He was also early trained to a military life, and served with some distinction in Ireland, where his father was lord lieuten ant. In 1643 he returned to England and joined the Parliamentary forces. In 1644 ALGERNON SIDNEY he was lieutenant-colonel of a regiment of horse in Manchester's army, and was se verely wounded at Marston Moor. In 1645 he was given the command of a cavalry regiment in Cromwell's division of Fairfax's army, and was returned to Parliament for Cardiff. He was nominated one of the commissioners to try Charles I., but took no part in the trial, though he approved of the sentence. He refused all concurrence in the government of Cromwell, retiring to Penshurst, but when the return of the Long Parliament in May, 1659, gave expectations of the establishment of a republic, he again took his seat and was nominated one of the council of state. He was soon after appointed a commissioner to mediate a peace between Denmark and Sweden, and while he was engaged in this embassy the Restoration took place. Conscious of the offence he SIDNEY had given the royal party, he refused to return and remained an exile for 17 years At length, in 1677, the influence of his friends procured him permission to return to England. After the death of Shaftesbury in 1682, he entered into the conference held between Monmouth, Russell, Essex, Hampden, and others, and on the discovery of the Rye House Plot he was arrested and sent to the Tower on a charge of high treason. He was tried before the notorious Chief Justice Jeffreys, and his trial was conducted with a shameless absence of equity which has conferred on him all the glory of a martyr. He was executed on Tower Hill, Dec. 7, 1683. His "Discourses Concerning Government" were first printed in 1698.

SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP, an English writer, soldier and man of affairs, born in 1554, the eldest son of Sir Henry and Lady Mary Sidney. As a child, he impressed all who knew him for such "lovely and familiar gravity as carried grace and reverence above greater years." He attended Christ Church, Oxford, completing the course at 17. In 1572 he went abroad to study the governments of Europe. At the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew he was in Paris. The blackness of the deed, which sent a shudder through all England, affected Sidney very powerfully, and he became identified with the party that held it to be the duty of the English Government to espouse the Protestant cause throughout Europe. He was interested in the political theories of the French Huguenots, and later met Languet in Frankfort, who exerted a great influence on his political ideas. His travels extended through Hungary, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. By 1575 he was at home again, and attended the Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth given by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, who hoped by the entertainment to win the hand of the queen. Soon after, he wrote a sonnet cycle, "Astrophel and Stella," telling his love, after approved court fashion, for the Lady Penelope Rich. In 1577 he again went abroad, this time to Germany, on diplomatic business. On his return he met the young poet Spenser, and became his patron. To him Spenser dedicated his first important series of poems, the "Shepheard's Calender" (1579).

Sidney wrote a powerful protest against the projected French marriage, and for his pains was exiled from the court for a time (1580), using his enforced leisure by writing a long pastoral romance, "Arcadia." This romance, which conformed to the ideas of poetry obtaining at the time, was a prose counterpart to Spenser's "Faerie Queene" and exerted considerable SIDNEY influence upon it. It is heroic, dealing with the education and character of the ideal prince; it contains many allegories, part of them being ethical and religious, others directly applicable to persons of the court; and it is related also to the political conditions of the time. It became the most famous of all Elizabethan literary works, excepting only the "Faerie Queene." Soon afterward Sidney wrote a "Defense of Poetry," which is a survey of the state of literature in England at about 1581, an application of Platonic doctrine to the theory of poetry as the loftiest of human disciplines, and eloquent defense of poetry against the attacks of Gosson and other Puritan defamers. an All these literary activities were in accordance with the idea of the time concerning the true courtier. The idea was that of complete and many-sided development. The courtier must excel in war, in all manly sports and exercises, in knowledge of men and affairs, in statecraft, and in music, art, poetry, and all the learning of the time. Many books were written, in Italy, France, and England, on the subject, and it was carried out in practice in schools founded on true humanistic principles. In "Astrophel and Stella," in "Arcadia," and in his voluminous correspondence, Sidney bears witness to the influence of this ideal as the conscious aim of all his self-training and activities. No small part of his tremendous influence, therefore, lies in the way in which his personality and achievement incarnated the highest cultural ideal of the time. The story of his life and opinions, as related by his friend Fulke Greville and as revealed in his letters, shows the high seriousness, the intelligent patriotism, and the extent of his studies of political conditions in Europe at a time when England's destiny hung in the balance. Thus to his love of literature was added his patriotic service to his prince as a true courtier. He carried the ideal farther than this. He was actively interested in Raleigh's colonizing ambitions, at one time being prevented from going to America only by the express injunction of the queen. He served in Parliament.

He held with Leicester and Spenser and Raleigh the view that English safety required active opposition to Philip of Spain, and that it was the duty of England to the world to assume the leadership of the Protestant cause throughout Europe. At length the long fight to induce Elizabeth to intervene in the Low Countries was won. Sidney went with the expedition sent by the queen. In September of 1586 he received the wound at Zutphen from which he died twenty-six days later, young in years but with a record SIDON of many-sided achievements outstanding even in that time of boundless activity.

As men of all nations had looked to him as a leader and had dedicated to him books in every field of human knowledge, so at his death every nation bore tribute to him. The mere list of the poetical tributes to his memory is without parallel elsewhere. But his greatest achievement was himself. His personality exerted a fascination not only on his contemporaries but on succeeding ages. He won immortality, not through his actual work, varied and worthy as that work was, but through himself.

SIDON (Hebrew, Zidon), anciently a city of Phoenicia; on the E. coast of the Mediterranean; half way between Tyre and Beyrout. It soon rose, both by its exceptional position and the enterprising character of its inhabitants, to the first position among the cities of Phoenicia, so that the whole country is sometimes designated by the name Sidon. The colonies extended over the coast of Asia Minor, the adjacent islands, Thrace and Euboea, , Thrace and Eubwa, and even some parts of Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, northern Africa, in fact, nearly Africa, in fa the whole of the ancient world. The Sidonian manufactures of glass and linen, purple dye and perfumes, were sources of vast wealth. At length it surrendered to Shalmaneser, King of Assyria. But under Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian domination it retained a kind of independence for its internal affairs, and under the Persians reached its highest prosperity. An unsuccessful revolt against Artaxerxes Ochus ended in its temporary ruin (351 B. c.). Speedily rebuilt and repeopled, it opened its gates to Alexander the Great (333 B. c.), and from that time forth it fell successively into the hands of Syrian, Greek, and Roman rulers. Through the Middle Ages little is heard of it, except that it was taken by the Crusaders. The present town of Saida has 15,000 inhabitants, of whom 7,000 are Mohammedans. In the neighborhood are numerous rockcut burial-places of the ancient Phœnicians, in which have been found the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, King of Assyria, and others. The town was stormed by the allies under Napier in 1840.

BENGEBIRGE, a small mountain range of Germany, on the right bank of the Rhine, not far from Bonn. Seven mountains tower above the rest, of which the Drachenfels, close to the Rhine, and presenting a splendid view from the river, is the most beautiful. On all of them are ruins of ancient castles.