Who is Delia, Diana, Coelia, Caelica, and all the rhyming of musical names? And who is the Dark Lady? What personalities hide behind these poet's imaginings? We know that now, as in troubadour days, the praises of grand ladies were sung with a warmth of language that should indicate personal acquaintance when no such acquaintance existed; and the sonneteers sometimes frankly confessed their passion "but supposed." All this adds to the difficulty of interpretation. In most cases the poet has effectually kept his secret; the search is futile, in spite of all the "scholastic labour-lost" devoted to it. Equally tantalising are the fleeting symbolisms that suggest themselves now and then. The confession sometimes made by the poet, that high-flown compliment and not true despair is intended, prepares us to accept the symbolic application where it forces itself upon us, and to feel the presence here and there of platonic or spiritual shadowings. Those who do not find pleasure in the Arcadian world of the sonneteer's fancy, may still justify their taste in the aspiration that speaks in his flashes of philosophy. PHILLIS HONORED WITH PASTORAL SONNETS, ELEGIES, AND AMOROUS DELIGHTS BY THOMAS LODGE THOMAS LODGE One of the first to take up the new fashion of the sonnet-cycle, was Thomas Lodge, whose "Phillis" was published in 1595. Lodge had a wide acquaintance among the authors of his time, and was in the thick of the literary activity in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. But in spite of his interesting personality and genius, he has had to wait until the present time for full appreciation. To his own age he may have appeared as a literary dilettante, who tried his hand at several forms of writing, and being outshone by the more excellent in each field, gave up the attempt and turned to the practice of medicine. This profession engaged him for the last twenty-five years of his life, until his death in 1625 at the advanced age of sixty-seven or eight. During all these years the gay young "university wit" of earlier days was probably forgotten in the venerable and successful physician. It was as "old Doctor Lodge" that he was satirised in a Cambridge student's Common-place Book in 1611. Heywood mentions him in 1609 among the six most famous physicians in England, and in the _Return from Parnassus_, a play acted in 1602, he is described as "turning over Galen every day."