His supposititious modern-antique _Poems of Rowley_ may, as actual
achievements, have been sometimes overpraised: but at the lowest
estimate they have beauties and excellences of the most startling kind.
He wrote besides a quantity of verse and prose, of a totally different
order. Keats admired Chatterton profoundly, and dedicated _Endymion_ to
his memory. I cannot find that Shelley, except in _Adonais_, has left
any remarks upon Chatterton: but he is said by Captain Medwin to have
been, in early youth, very much impressed by his writings.
1. 5. _Sidney, as he fought_, &c. Sir Philip Sidney, author of _The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, the _Apology for Poetry_, and the
sonnets named _Astrophel and Stella_, died in his thirty-second year, of
a wound received in the battle of Zutphen, 1586. Shelley intimates that
Sidney maintained the character of being 'sublimely mild' in fighting,
falling (dying), and loving, as well as generally in living. The special
references appear to be these. (1) Sidney, observing that the Lord
Marshal, the Earl of Leicester, had entered the field of Zutphen without
greaves, threw off his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot
which slew him.
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