that by their time Sidney's sonnets were known and Spenser had written
much. The seed was scattered abroad, and it fell in congenial soil in
falling on Watson, but the _Hecatompathia_ was self-sown.

This difference shows itself very remarkably in the vast outburst of
sonneteering which, as has been remarked, distinguished the middle of the
last decade of the sixteenth century. All these writers had Sidney and
Spenser before them, and they assume so much of the character of a school
that there are certain subjects, for instance, "Care-charming sleep," on
which many of them (after Sidney) composed sets of rival poems, almost as
definitely competitive as the sonnets of the later "Uranie et Job" and
"Belle Matineuse" series in France. Nevertheless, there is in all of
them--what as a rule is wanting in this kind of clique verse--the
independent spirit, the original force which makes poetry. The Smiths and
the Fletchers, the Griffins and the Lynches, are like little geysers round
the great ones: the whole soil is instinct with fire and flame. We shall,
however, take the production of the four remarkable years 1593-1596
separately, and though in more than one case we shall return upon their
writers both in this chapter and in a subsequent one, the unity of the
sonnet impulse seems to demand separate mention for them here.

In 1593 the influence of the Sidney poems (published, it must be
remembered, in 1591) was new, and the imitators, except Watson (of whom
above), display a good deal of the quality of the novice. The chief of them
are Barnabe Barnes, with his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Giles Fletcher
(father of the Jacobean poets, Giles and Phineas Fletcher), with his
_Licia_, and Thomas Lodge, with his _Phillis_. Barnes is a modern
discovery, for before Dr. Grosart reprinted him in 1875, from the unique
original at Chatsworth, for thirty subscribers only (of whom I had the
honour to be one), he was practically unknown. Mr. Arber has since, in his
_English Garner_, opened access to a wider circle, to whom I at least do
not grudge their entry. As with most of these minor Elizabethan poets,
Barnes is a very obscure person. A little later than _Parthenophil_ he
wrote _A Divine Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets_, having, like many of his
contemporaries, an apparent desire poetically to make the best of both
worlds. He also wrote a wild play in the most daring Elizabethan style,
called _The Devil's Charter_, and a prose politic