helped Greene-when the latter was striving to rival Marlowe's Tamburlaine-in the composition of A LookingGlass for London. His earliest attempt at original composition was a narrative tract in the manner of EuphuesAn Alarum against Usurers, published in 1584. In 1588 he made a voyage to the Canaries, and during his absence his Glaucus and Scilla, the first of English mythological poems, was published. This was followed in 1590 by his best-known work, Euphues' Golden Legacy-from which Shakespeare took the plot of As You Like It-and by Euphues' Shadow. In 1591 Lodge accompanied Thomas Cavendish on his voyage to the Straits of Magellan; in the same year Spenser alluded to him in Colin Clout's Come Home Again as "pleasing Alcon," while he himself published the first of his prose satires Catharos. He appeared in 1593 among the sonneteers with a series of poems addressed to "Phillis," and wrote soon afterwards in the Euphuistic style a romantic history of The Life and Death of William Longbeard. Returning to the satiric vein, he published his Spider's Web in prose in 1594, and A Fig for Momus, a collection of satires and epistles in verse, in 1595. last work-as far as is known-was his Margarite of America, a story published in 1596; after which he seems to have abandoned literature for medicine. He became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1625.2

His

Lodge has suffered the fate of all poets who have thought of their style before their subject. He had a graceful fancy, a fine taste, and a tuneful ear, but his mind was not possessed by any idea of universal interest. He was first inspired to write by the atmosphere of prevailing Euphuism; most of his compositions -plays, novels, histories, sonnets, and satires-are steeped in this fashionable manner. For many of the subjects he attempted he had no turn. His dramas are written with a heavy hand; his satires are of that general kind which awakens no fear, and therefore no interest. The sonnet

1 Colin Clout's Come Home Again, v. 394.

2 His works have been published by the Hunterian Club, 1887, with an excellent Memoir by Mr. Gosse.

had long ceased to yield any fresh store of conceits; and the only novelties that Lodge could introduce into it for the glorification of his Phillis were double rhymes and fresh mechanical combinations of sound; for example:I wrote in Mirrha's bark, and as I wrote

Poor Mirrha wept, because I wrote forsaken,
'Twas of thy pride I sung in weeping note,
When as her leaves great moan for pity maken.

The falling fountains, from the mountains falling,
Cried out alas, so fair and be so ruthless,
And babbling echoes never ceasèd calling,
Phillis disdain is fit for none but truthless.

The rising pines, wherein I had engraved,
Thy memory consulting with the wind,
Are trucemen to thy heart and thoughts depraved,
And say thy kind should not be so unkind.

But out alas, so fell is Phillis fereless,

That she hath made her Damon well-nigh tearless.1

On the other hand, when he leaves the sonnet and strikes a pastoral note, the following charming verses show at once that he is on his own ground :

My Phillis hath the morning sun

At first to look upon her,

And Phillis hath morn-waking birds
Her risings for to honour.

My Phillis hath prime-feathered flowers

That smile when she treads on them,

And Phillis hath a gallant flock

That leaps since she doth own them.
But Phillis hath so hard a heart,

Alas! that she should have it

As yields no mercy to desart,

Nor grace to those that crave it.

Sweet sun, when thou lookst on,
Pray her regard my moan,

Sweet birds, when you sing to her,

To yield some pity woo her;

Sweet flowers, when as she treads on,

Tell her her beauty deads one;

And if in life her love she nill agree me,

Pray her before I die she will come see me.2

1 Phillis (1593), sonnet xiv.

2 These lines are erroneously ascribed by Mr. Grosart to Dyer (Fuller Worthies Miscellanies, Dyer's Poems, p. 41). They appear in Lodge's Phillis (1593).

The themes with which his genius is most in sympathy are mythological or romantic love stories in which his fancy can wander freely, and make excursions at pleasure into lyric verse. He had something of Ovid's ingenious invention; and this shines particularly in Scilla's Metamorphosis, the first of a long line of subjects suggested to English poets by classical mythology. Here his narrative style is picturesque and flowing :

He that had seen the sweet Arcadian boy
Wiping the purple from his forced wound,
His pretty tears betokening his annoy,
His sighs, his cries, his falling to the ground,
The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall,
The trees with tears reporting of his thrall ;
And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry,
Forcing her birds to haste her chariot on
And full of grief, at last with piteous eye
Seen where all pale with death he lay alone;

Whose beauty quailed as wont the lilies droop,
When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop.

Her dainty hand addressed to daw her dear,
Her roseal lips applied to his pale cheek,
Her sighs, and then her looks and heavy cheer,
Her bitter threats, and then her passions meek;
How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying.

"This" (says Mr. Gosse, justly) "is very close to the earliest manner of Shakespeare; and if we turn from Glaucus and Scilla to Venus and Adonis, we shall be struck by the resemblance in many points. There can be no doubt that the young Shakespeare borrowed from Lodge his tone, the mincing sweetness of his versification, and the precious' use of such words as 'lily,' 'purple,' "1 'crystal,' and 'primrose.'

Lodge may also claim the honour of having inspired Shakespeare with As You Like It. In Euphues' Golden Legacy, the story is very gracefully told in prose interspersed with lyrics, as in Sidney's Arcadia and Greene's Menaphon. The songs have much beauty though of an

1 Memoir of Thomas Lodge. Prefixed to the works of the author. Printed for the Hunterian Club, 1887.

artificial kind.

Here is Rosader's (Orlando's) description

of Rosalynde, whose name is borrowed from The Shepherd's Calendar:

Like to the clear in highest sphere,

Where all imperial glory shines,
Of self-same colour is her hair,
Whether unfolded or in twines.

Heigh ho, fair Rosalynde !

Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink ;
The gods do fear when as they glow,
And I do tremble when I think.

Heigh ho, would she were mine!
Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora's face,

Or like the crimson silver shroud,
That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace,
Heigh ho, fair Rosalynde!

Her lips are like two budded roses,
Whom ranks of lilies neighbour nigh,
Within which bounds she balm encloses
Apt to entice a deity.

Heigh ho, would she were mine!

And Rosalynde's own madrigal, describing "how many fathom deep she is in love," has all the graceful, though effeminate, fancy characteristic of the epigrammatists of Alexandria:

:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet;

Now with his wings he plays with me,

Now with his feet:

Within mine eyes he makes his nest,

His bed amidst my tender breast;

My kisses are his daily feast,

And yet he robs me of my rest.
Ah wanton, will ye?

And if I sleep then percheth he

With pretty flight,

And makes his pillow of my knee

The livelong night.

Strike I my lute, he tunes the string;

He music plays if so I sing;

He lends me every lovely thing;

Yet cruel he my heart doth sting:
Whist wanton, still ye!

spirit of

Lodge, in all his poems, toys with the the Renaissance in the manner of a Euphuist. But the artificiality of Euphuism is borne down by the powerful genius of Christopher Marlowe, who, following up, in his Hero and Leander, the path opened out by Lodge, treats his theme with a more than Pagan freedom. Since Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida no poem had appeared giving anything like the same direct and dramatic representation of human passion. Chaucer had depicted female fickleness and levity violating the laws and conventions enforced on chivalrous lovers by the Cours d'Amour. Marlowe, in his expansion of the pseudo-Musæus, represents, with all the energy of his genius, the effects of youthful love, portraying with astonishing skill the difference of its manifestation in the heart of either sex. Though his style is coloured with the conceits and mannerism of the period, yet, as compared with the diction of contemporary Euphuistic writers, it has a fiery strength and vigour not to be found in any other man. Take, for example, the description of Leander on his return to his father's house after his first meeting with Hero: :