reen for
lovers of pure poetry.

Lodge's lyric genius was a clear if slender rill. His faults are the
more unpardonable since they spring from sheer carelessness and a lack
of appreciation of the sacred responsibility of creative power. He took
up the literary fashion of the month and tried his hand at it; that
done, he was ready for the next mode. He did not wait to perfect his
work or to compare result with result; therefore he probably never found
himself, probably never realised that after three centuries he would be
esteemed, not for the ponderous tomes of his translation of Josephus,
not for all the catalogues of his satirical and religious and scientific
writings, but for mere lyrics like the "Heigh ho, fair Rosaline," and
"Love in my bosom like a bee," heedlessly imbedded in the heart of a
prose romance.

Lodge was one of the earliest to follow the example of Sidney in linking
a sequence of sonnets together into a sonnet-cycle. The _Astrophel and
Stella_ was published in 1591, though it had doubtless before this been
handed about, as was the Elizabethan fashion, in manuscript. Early in
1591 also when Daniel was probably abroad, twenty-seven of the
fifty-seven sonnets that a year later formed the sonnet-cycle _Delia_
were published in his absence. Now in August of 1591 Lodge set sail with
Cavendish on that long voyage to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan from
which he did not return till early in ninety-three, and it was during
his absence that Daniel's and Constable's sonnet-cycles came out. It is
possible that Lodge saw Daniel's series, as he doubtless did Sidney's,
in manuscript before he left England, but the Induction to _Phillis_,
which carries a message to Delia's "sweet prophet," was almost certainly
written later, and in the absence of further proof it seems no more than
fair to allow Lodge to share with Daniel and Constable the honour of
being the earliest to take the hint Sidney had offered.

On the whole, Lodge's sonnets show a much more cheerful and buoyant
temper than Daniel's "wailing verse." The "sad horror, pale grief,
prostrate despair" that inform the _Delia_, are replaced in the
_Phillis_ by a spirit of airy toying, a pleasure in the graces of fancy
even when they cluster around a feeling of sadness. During Lodge's
absence, his friend Robert Green published several pieces for him, and
in one of the prefaces promised the public to present on his return
"what labours Lodge's sea-studies affo