ful" as the others,
but the collection illustrates an early effort to turn the poetic energy
into a new field, to broaden the scope of subject-matter possible in
sonnet-form. The poet was evidently a close student of the
sonnet-structure. He used the Italian and the English form in about an
equal number of cases but he experiments on a large variety of
rime-arrangements besides.

As to the personality honoured under the name of Diana, there seems to
be much obscurity. From the sonnet _To his Mistress_, we learn that
though he addresses several he loves but one.

"Grace full of grace, though in these verses here
My love complains of others than of thee,
Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me,
Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were."

So he loved her, it seems, while she was "yet unknown," something quite
possible in the sonneteer's world: and her personality, though shadowed
under various names, is to the poet a distinct conception. To the honour
of being this poet's inspirer, there are two claimants; one the Lady
Rich, the Stella of Sidney, the other the ill-fated Arabella Stuart. It
is noteworthy that the only one of all the sonnets addressed personally
to particular ladies that is retained in the edition of 1594, is one to
Lady Rich. But this sonnet tells us little except that "wished fortune"
had once made it possible for him to see her in all her beauty of roses
and lilies, stars and waves of gold: but this might have happened if he
had once seen that beauteous lady pass along the street in the queen's
glittering train. Other sonnets to or about the Lady Rich are equally
uncommunicative; and if the ill-starred Penelope Devereux is the one
alone that Constable loved, Time has shut the secret tightly in his
heart and will not give it up.

The other guess is but little nearer to certainty. During the years that
Constable was pursuing his shadowy schemes, Arabella Stuart was an
object of admiration and of political jealousy; the house where she
lived was constantly spied upon, her very tutors were suspected, the
wildest schemes were formed upon her royal connections, and it would not
be strange if the heart of our poetical zealot turned toward this star
of his cause. We may be sure that he would not have been averse to a
clandestine meeting, for in writing to that arch-plotter, the Countess
of Shrewsbury, Arabella's doting grandmother, he says: "It is more
convenient to write unto your Ladyship, than