e's inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid--'blind
hitting boy,' he calls him--in his _Astrophel_ (No. xlvi.) Cupid is
similarly invoked in three of Drayton's sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition
of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in
Fulke Greville's collection entitled _Coelica_ (cf. lxxxiv., beginning
'Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth'). Lyly, in his _Sapho
and Phao_, 1584, and in his _Mother Bombie_, 1598, has songs of like
temper addressed in the one case to 'O Cruel love!' and in the other to
'O Cupid! monarch over kings.' A similar theme to that of Shakespeare's
Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, 'Love is ever dying,'
in his tragedy of the _Broken Heart_, 1633.

{98} See p. 113, note 2.

{101a} 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, _OEuvres Poetiques_, edited by Reinhold
Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60.

{101b} See Appendix IX.

{101c} Section X. of the Appendix to this volume supplies a
bibliographical note on the sonnet in France between 1550 and 1600, with
a list of the sixteenth-century sonnetteers of Italy.

{101d} Gabriel Harvey, in his _Pierces Supererogation_ (1593, p. 61),
after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's
invention is pure love itself; Petrarch's elocution pure beauty itself'),
justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground
that 'all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their
several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or
divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and
beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.' Both French and
English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of
plagiarising Petrarch's sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay's _Les Amours_,
ed. Becq de Fouquieres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel's _Delia_, Sonnet
xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French
sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a
popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions
lxxxviii.) in _Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura_, beginning 'S' amor non e,
che dunque e quel ch' i' sento?' with a rendering of it into French like
that of De Baif in his _Amours de Francine_ (ed. Becq de Fouquieres, p.
121), beginning, 'Si ce n'est pas Amour, que sent donques mon coeur?' or
with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in
his _Passio