_Early Work._ After leaving Oxford, Lodge returned to London and entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn, in other words took up the study of the law. Legal studies seem not to have absorbed his attention to the total exclusion of literary work. The occasion of his first publication was the death of his mother in 1579. In that year appeared the "Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge." This is not extant, but his reply to Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse" has survived. Gosson's book had been a furious attack upon the contemporary drama. Lodge's reply was a fair sample of the literary billingsgate of that controversial age and deserves the oblivion into which it promptly sank. His next publication was his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), a book belonging to a class of tracts popular in that day in which the characters and customs of the underworld of London were exposed to popular execration. The impulse to engage in this journalistic kind of work Lodge may have owed to Robert Greene, the dramatist, with whom he at this time became intimate, and whose popular books on cony-catching the "Alarum," in its spirit and purpose, closely resembles. Greene certainly furnished some of the inspiration for the dramatic attempts that followed. Lodge's play, "The Wounds of Civil War," though not printed till 1594, may have been acted in 1587. We know that he collaborated with Greene in "A Looking Glass for London and England," produced in 1592. _Later Work and Death._ It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose, was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was on a freebooting expedition to the Azores and the Canaries, "when every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with a storm." The immediate success of "Rosalynde" encouraged Lodge to continue the writing of romances. The best known of those that followed, and one of the prettiest of his stories, is "A Margarite [i.e. pearl] of America." This was written while Lodge was engaged in another patriotic raid under Captain Cavendish against the Spanish colonies of South America. The romance is in no sense American, and owes its title solely to the fact that it was written, or, as Lodge claims, translated from the Spanish, while Lodge's ship was cruising off the coast of Patagonia. Lodge certainly knew Spanish; and during the month that the expedition lingered at Santos in Brazil, he spent much of his time in the library of the Jesuit College. Possibly this was the beginning of his leaning toward Catholicism. At all events, he later became a Roman Catholic and wrote in support of that faith at a time when to be other than a Protestant in England was extremely dangerous.