The description of an envious man in the second book,[72] which suggested to Sir Richard Steele his essay in the nineteenth number of the _Spectator_, is another good example of Sidney's ability in delineating character. The passage in which Musidorus is represented showing off the paces of his horse,[73] a subject especially adapted to excite the best effort of the author, is a very remarkable effort of descriptive power, for the insertion of which, unfortunately, space is wanting here. Sidney might have quoted his description of Pamela sewing, to justify his belief that "It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy":
Pamela, who that day having wearied her selfe with reading, * * * was working upon a purse certaine roses and lillies. * * * The flowers shee had wrought caried such life in them, that the cunningest painter might have learned of her needle: which, with so pretty a manner, made his careers to & fro through the cloth, as if the needle it selfe would haue been loth to haue gone fromward such a mistresse, but that it hoped to returne thitherward very quickly againe; the cloth looking with many eyes vpon her, and louingly embracing the wounds she gaue it: the sheares also were at hand to behead the silke that was growne too short. And if at any time shee put her mouth to bite it off, it seemed, that where she had beene long in making of a rose with her hands, she would in an instant make roses with her lips; as the lillies seemed to haue their whitenesse rather of the hand that made them, than of the matter whereof they were made; & that they grew there by the suns of her eyes, and were refreshed by the most * * * comfortable ayre, which an unawares sigh might bestow upon them.[74]
Charles I. passed many hours of his prison life in reading the "Arcadia," and Milton[75] accused him of stealing a prayer of Pamela to insert in the "Eikon Basilike": "And that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia'; a book in that kind, full of worth and wit, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be named: nor to be read at any time without good caution, much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian's prayerbook." This prayer is in itself so beautiful, coming from the lips of Pamela, and the greater part of it suits so perfectly the unhappy circumstances of King Charles, that at the risk of unduly multiplying our extracts from the "Arcadia," it will be inserted here:--