"Only hope of our age, that virtues dead By your sweet breath should be revived again; Learning discouraged long by rude disdain By your white hands is only cherished. Thus others' worth by you is honoured. But who shall honour yours? Poor wits, in vain We seek to pay the debts which you pertain Till from yourself some wealth be borrowed. Lend some your tongues, that every nation may In his own hear your virtuous praises blaze; Lend them your wit, your judgment, memory, Lest they themselves should not know what to say; And that thou mayst be loved as much as praised, My heart thou mayst lend them which I gave thee." The last of Constable's sonnets in the edition of 1592 is this dedicatory address: "My mistress' worth gave wings unto my muse And my muse wings did give unto her name, So, like twin birds, my muse bred with her fame Together now do learn their wings to use. And in this book, which here you may peruse, Abroad they fly, resolved to try the same Adventure in their flight; and thee, sweet dame, Both she and I for our protection choose; I by my vow, and she by farther right Under your phoenix (wing) presume to fly; That from all carrion beaks in safety might By one same wing be shrouded, she and I. O happy, if I might but flitter there Where you and she and I should be so near." The value of this author's praise, however, is somewhat impaired by the extravagances in certain sonnets where, for instance, he honours a lady whose soul, he says, was "endued in her lifetime with infinite perfections as her divine poems do testify," when she on earth did sing poet-wise angels in heaven prayed for her company, and when she died, her "fair and glittering rays increased the light of heaven;" where again he calls on the Countess of Essex to revenge the death of her first husband, Sir Philip Sidney, upon the Spanish people by murdering them _en masse_ with her eyes, and where he calls the Countess of Shrewsbury "chieftain of Venus's host," and places her crowned in heaven beside the Virgin Mary. Constable's zealous publisher was not far wrong when he claimed that in this poet "conceit first claimed his birthright to enjoy," and since we do not find either in the sonnets to Lady Rich or in those to Lady Arabella any special tone of sincerity that leads us to have confidence in our conjecture, we shall be compelled to leave this puzzle unsolved. DIANA UNTO HER MAJESTY'S SACRED HONOURABLE MAIDS