What "shadowings" the poet may intend he refuses to confide to us. "If thou muse what my Licia is, take her to be some Diana, at the least chaste; or some Minerva; no Venus, fairer far. It may be she is Learning's image, or some heavenly wonder, which the precisest may not dislike: perhaps under that name I have shadowed Discipline. It may be I mean that kind courtesy which I found at the patroness of these poems. It may be some college; it may be my conceit, and portend nothing." It is evident then that the patroness herself is not the real person behind the poetic title. He therefore dedicates _Licia_ to Lady Molineux, not because the sonnets themselves are addressed to her, but because he has received "favours undeserved" at her hands and those of "wise Sir Richard" for which he "wants means to make recompence," and therefore in the meantime he begs her to accept this. "If thou like it," he says to the reader, "take it, and thank the worthy Lady Mollineux, for whose sake thou hast it; worthy, indeed, and so not only reputed by me in private affection of thankfulness but so equally to be esteemed by all that know her. For if I had not received of her ... those unrequitable favours, I had not thus idly toyed." A warm admirer of Fletcher has expressed his opinion that _Licia_ "sparkles with brilliants of the first water." A more temperate judgment is that of another, who says that he "took part without discredit in the choir of singers who were men of action too." _Licia_ is what a typical sonnet-cycle ought to be, a delicate and almost intangible thread of story on which are strung the separate sonnet-pearls. In this case the jewels have a particular finish. Fletcher has adopted the idea of a series of quatrains, often extending the number to four, and a concluding couplet, which he seems fond of utilising to give an epigrammatic finish to the ingenious incident he so often makes the subject of the sonnet. He is fully in the spirit of the Italian mode, however, acknowledging in his title page his indebtedness to poets of other nationalities than his own. TO LICIA THE WISE, KIND, VIRTUOUS, AND FAIR