bly not much
later. Then the fashion changed, or the vein was worked out, or (more
fancifully) the impossibility of equalling Spenser and Shakespere choked
off competitors. The date of Lord Brooke's singular _Coelica_, not
published till long afterwards, is uncertain; but he may, probably, be
classed with Sidney and Watson in period.

[24] _Delia_ had appeared earlier in 1592, and partially in 1591; but the
text of 1594 is the definitive one. Several of these dates are doubtful or
disputed.

Fulke, or, as he himself spelt it, Foulke Greville, in his later years Lord
Brooke,[25] was of a noble house in Warwickshire connected with the
Beauchamps and the Willoughbys. He was born in 1554, was educated at
Shrewsbury with Philip Sidney, whose kinsman, lifelong friend, and first
biographer he was--proceeded, not like Sidney to Oxford, but to Cambridge
(where he was a member, it would seem, of Jesus College, not as usually
said of Trinity)--received early lucrative preferments chiefly in
connection with the government of Wales, was a favourite courtier of
Elizabeth's during all her later life, and, obtaining a royal gift of
Warwick Castle, became the ancestor of the present earls of Warwick. In
1614 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Brooke, who lived to a
considerable age, was stabbed in a rather mysterious manner in 1628 by a
servant named Haywood, who is said to have been enraged by discovering that
his master had left him nothing in his will. The story is, as has been
said, mysterious, and the affair seems to have been hushed up. Lord Brooke
was not universally popular, and a very savage contemporary epitaph on him
has been preserved. But he had been the patron of the youthful Davenant,
and has left not a little curious literary work, which has only been
recently collected, and little of which saw the light in his own lifetime.
Of his two singular plays, _Mustapha_ and _Alaham_ (closet-dramas having
something in common with the Senecan model), _Mustapha_ was printed in
1609; but it would seem piratically. His chief prose work, the _Life of
Sidney_, was not printed till 1652. His chief work in verse, the singular
_Poems of Monarchy_ (ethical and political treatises), did not appear till
eighteen years later, as well as the allied _Treatise on Religion_. But
poems or tracts on human learning, on wars, and other things, together with
his tragedies as above, had appeared in 1633. This publication, a folio
volume, also