Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments.
But 'even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,'
wrote Gabriel Harvey in 'Pierces Supererogation' in 1593, 'are but
dainties of a pleasurable wit.' Drayton's sonnets more nearly approached
Shakespeare's in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton
told the readers of his collection entitled 'Idea' {105} (after the
French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go
elsewhere. 'In all humours _sportively_ he ranged,' he declared. Giles
Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets
entitled 'Licia, or Poems of Love,' with the warning, 'Now in that I have
written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let
him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may
write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to
the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.'
{106a}

Contemporary censure of sonnetteers' false sentiment. 'Gulling Sonnets.'

The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their
monotonous and mechanical treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or
the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of
contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from
the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey
wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the
conventional sonnet-sequence in his 'Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The
Student's Loove or Hatrid.' {106b} Chapman in 1595, in a series of
sonnets entitled 'A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,' appealed to his
literary comrades to abandon 'the painted cabinet' of the love-sonnet for
a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the
sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a
sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron
of Drayton's 'Idea'), he inveighed against the 'bastard sonnets' which
'base rhymers' 'daily' begot 'to their own shames and poetry's disgrace.'
In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in
manuscript a specimen series of nine 'gulling sonnets' or parodies of the
conventional efforts. {107a} Even Shakespeare does not seem to have
escaped Davies's condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the
sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal