he 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. Sometime previous to 1600 he took a degree of
doctor of medicine at Avignon and wrote among other medical treatises
one on the plague. Of this disease, it is said, he died in 1625.

_Source of "Rosalynde": "The Tale of Gamelyn."_ Lodge did not invent
the plot of "Rosalynde." The story is based upon "The Tale of
Gamelyn." This is a narrative in rough ballad form, written in the
fourteenth century and formerly attributed to Chaucer. Indeed all the
copies of it that have been preserved occur in the manuscripts of the
"Canterbury Tales" under the title "The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn." From
the "Tale" Lodge borrowed and adapted the account of the death of old
Sir John of Bordeaux, the subsequent quarrel of his sons, the plot of
the elder against the younger by which the latter was to be killed in
a wrestling bout, the wrestling itself, the flight of the younger
accompanied by the faithful Adam to the Forest of Arden, and their
falling in with a band of outlaws feasting. Yet from the "Tale" Lodge
took hardly more than a suggestion. All the love story was his own.
Original also, so far as we know,[1] was the story of the two kings,
and the pastoral element--for "Rosalynde" is a pastoral romance.

[Footnote 1: It has been conjectured that L