.

The Wounds of Civill War. Lively set forth in the true Tragedies of
Marius and Scilla. As it hath beene publiquely plaide in London, by the
Right Honourable the Lord high Admirall his Servants. Written by Thomas
Lodge, Gent_. O vita! misero longa, faelici brevis. _London, Printed by
John Danter, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Paules
Church-yarde_. 1594. 4to.

MR. COLLIER'S PREFACE.[89]

Thomas Lodge, in his "Alarum against Usurers," 1584, speaks of his
"birth," and of "the offspring from whence he came," as if he were at
least respectably descended; and on the authority of Anthony Wood, it
has been asserted by all subsequent biographers that he was of a
Lincolnshire family. [The fact is, that Lodge was the second son of Sir
Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London, who died in 1584, by his wife, the
daughter of Sir William Laxton.] Thomas Salter, about the year 1580,
dedicated his "Mirror of Modesty" to [the poet's mother, Lady Anne
Lodge].

Langbaine seems to be under a mistake when he states that Lodge was of
Cambridge. Wood claims him for the University of Oxford,[90] where he
traces him as early as 1573, when he must have been about seventeen
years old, if he were born, as is generally supposed, in 1556. We are
told by himself that he was a Servitor of Trinity College, and that he
was educated under Sir Edward Hoby. At what time and for what cause
Lodge left Oxford is not known; but Stephen Gosson, in the dedication of
his "Plays Confuted in Five Actions," printed about 1582,[91] accuses
him of having become "a vagrant person, visited by the heavy hand of
God," as if he had taken to the stage, and thereby had incurred the
vengeance of heaven. In 1584, when Lodge answered Gosson, he was a
student of Lincoln's Inn;[92] and to "his courteous friends, the
Gentlemen of the Inns of Court," he dedicated his "Alarum against
Usurers." He afterwards, as he informs Lord Hunsdon, in the epistle
before his "Rosalynde," 1590, "fell from books to arms;" and he calls it
"the work of a soldier and a scholar," adding that he had sailed with
Captain Clarke to the islands of Terceras and the Canaries. In 1596, he
published his "Margarite of America," and he mentions that it was
written in the Straits of Magellan, on a voyage with Cavendish. To this
species of vagrancy, however, Gosson did not refer.

That Lodge was vagrant in his pursuits we have sufficient evidence; for,
after having perhaps been upon the s