Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora.'

To the same era belongs Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora,' a collection of
a hundred and six sonnets, with a few songs and elegies interspersed on
French patterns. Sir William describes the work as 'the first fancies of
his youth,' and formally inscribes it to Agnes, Countess of Argyle. It
was not published till 1604. {438b}

Sir Fulke Greville's 'Caelica.'

Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the intimate friend of Sir
Philip Sidney, was author of a like collection of sonnets called
'Caelica.' The poems number a hundred and nine, but few are in strict
sonnet metre. Only a small proportion profess to be addressed to the
poet's fictitious mistress, Caelica. Many celebrate the charms of
another beauty named Myra, and others invoke Queen Elizabeth under her
poetic name of Cynthia (cf. Sonnet xvii.) There are also many addresses
to Cupid and meditations on more or less metaphysical themes, but the
tone is never very serious. Greville doubtless wrote the majority of his
'Sonnets' during the period under survey, though they were not published
until their author's works appeared in folio for the first time in 1633,
five years after his death.

Estimate of number of love-sonnets issued between 1591 and 1597.

With Tofte's volume in 1597 the publication of collections of
love-sonnets practically ceased. Only two collections on a voluminous
scale seem to have been written in the early years of the seventeenth
century. About 1607 William Drummond of Hawthornden penned a series of
sixty-eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, nearly all
of which were translated or adapted from modern Italian sonnetteers.
{439a} About 1610 John Davies of Hereford published his 'Wittes
Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous Sonnets.' Of more than two
hundred separate poems in this volume, only the hundred and four sonnets
in the opening section make any claim to answer the description on the
title-page, and the majority of those are metaphysical meditations on
love which are not addressed to any definite person. Some years later
William Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sonnets entitled
'Caelia' and a few detached sonnets of the same type. {439b} The dates
of production of Drummond's, Davies's, and Browne's sonnets exclude them
from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that between 1591
and 1597 there had been printed nearly twelve hundred