Excerpt from The Defense of Poesy: Otherwise Known as an Apology for Poetry
Sidney's estimate of poetry heralded such poetic achieve ment as the world had only once or twice witnessed. What Sidney outlined, Spenser and Shakespeare executed, though not always in the precise forms which he himself would have approved. In this essay he appears as a link between the soundest. Theory of ancient times and the romantic pro duction of the modern era, as a humanist actuated by ethi cal convictions, as a man of affairs discharging the function of the scholar with the imaginative insight of the poet. T o assist in placing the student of English literature at the point of View from which he can rightly judge of the merits and relations of Sidney's immortal disquisition is the object of the present editor's labors.
In modernizing the spelling and punctuation of the text, I have been guided by the principles which have been well expressed by Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, in the Preface to his edition of Bacon's Essays, pp. Iii - iv: As regards spelling, the principle adopted in the following pages is this: what ever quotations or extracts are made for critical or antiqua rian purposes are printed with the old spelling, but the Essays themselves are placed on the same footing as the Bible and Shakespeare; and, as being not for an age but for all ages, they are spelt with the spelling of this age.
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