Philip II, as everyone knows, was an armchair strategist; he lacked the physical stamina of a military man, and the nearest he came to seeing a field of battle was his visit to St. Quentin (1557) after his troops had gained him a great victory there. Charles V was wise enough not to push his son beyond his limits; he never made him participate in one of his many wars. Yet a legend of relatively recent origin now sees Philip take part, at the age of fifteen, in the Spanish triumph (1542) at Perpignan.

The facts of this event may be summed up as follows: In the summer of 1542, after not quite four years of the ten-year truce between Charles V and Francis I had passed, French armies under the Dauphin (the later Henri II) set out in June toward Narbonne, aiming to advance on the (then) Spanish county of Rosellón (Roussillon), laying siege to Perpignan in the latter part of August. The Duke of Alba, anticipating their approach, had improved Perpignan's fortifications in good time and lined up an overflow of Spanish armies ready to meet the attackers.

Mopsa, a stupid country wench in Sidney's Arcadia, is such a delightful comic creation that one is curious to know more about her origin and function. William Ringler suggests that the name is ‘probably from Mopsus, a shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues.’ In the Fifth Eclogue one of the two shepherds in the singing contest is named Mopsus. In the Eighth Eclogue the embittered shepherd Damon laments the loss of Nysa, mentioning that she has married Mopsus. Since Sidney uses other names from the Eclogues (Dametas, Menalcas) and since Mopsa is the daughter of a shepherd, Professor Ringler's suggestion has merit.

Virgil is probably not the only source of Mopsa's name, however; I suggest that Sidney is making a kind of pun, humorously combining the name's Virgilian associations with those surrounding the Dutch word mops and its playfully Latinized form Mopsus or, feminine, Mopsa. Mops means ‘pug dog’ and, formerly, by extension, meant ‘countrylout' also; Mopsa in the Arcadia is in a sense ‘doggy’ and is clearly a country lout.

In 1626 Tristan I'Hermite was commissioned to write a poetic description of Berny, the country house near Bourg-la-Reine to which the Marquise de Puisieux had been obliged to withdraw following her husband's disgrace at court. The chateau, a handsome maison de plaisance surrounded by extensive formal gardens, was one of the earliest designed by François Mansard and had been built for the father-in-law of the marquise, the Chancellor Sillery.