es;" and Sidney has been
found to be one of the "honourable and learned personages" whose works
were laid under contribution to make the book; but since the whole first
and second decades are the same as in the earlier volume by "H.C." which
contained also the King James sonnets attributed by numerous
contemporaries to Henry Constable, and since as yet, beside the ten by
Sidney, no more of the sonnets have by antiquarian research been traced
to their sources in the mazes of Elizabethan common-place books, it
seems but fair to leave the _Diana_ of 1594 in the hands of Constable.
All three books, the '92 and '94 editions and the manuscript volume,
show a like taste for orderly arrangement not found in general in the
sonnet-cycles.

Constable was a Cambridge man and was thirty years old when the _Diana_
was first printed. He lived until 1613 and bore an excellent reputation
in his day. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, who speaks of his
"ambrosaic Muse," of Sidney, Harington, Tofte, and other literary men.
If toying with the sonnet in _Diana_ seems to indicate a light and
trifling spirit, we have to yield that with Constable as with Fletcher
the graver matters of state policy formed the chief interest in life to
the author. In Constable's case the interest was religious and the poet
was personally a man of devout feeling. Writing from the Tower, where
for a time he was detained, he says, "Whether I remain in prison or go
out, I have learned to live alone with God." At the conclusion of the
third part of the Harleian Miscellany transcript, the author says: "When
I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by
idle hours writ, did amount just to the diametrical number 63,
methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the
remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter."
It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his
devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of
God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that
passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows
the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn
between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new
revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching
out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the
higher in its grasp. These sonnets are as "conceit