Sonnet lxxxv. 6-7 credits his rival with
writing 'hymns.' But Drayton, in his _Harmonie of the Church_, 1591, and
Barnes, as we have just seen, both wrote 'hymns.' The word was not
loosely used in Elizabethan English, as in sixteenth-century French, in
the general sense of 'poem.'

{136} See p. 127, note I.

{137} Sir Walter Ralegh was wont to apostrophise his aged sovereign
thus:

Oh, hopeful love, my object and invention,
Oh, true desire, the spur of my conceit,
Oh, worthiest spirit, my mind's impulsion,
Oh, eyes transparent, my affection's bait;
Oh, princely form, my fancy's adamant,
Divine conceit, my pain's acceptance,
Oh, all in one! Oh, heaven on earth transparent!
The seat of joy and love's abundance!

(Cf. _Cynthia_, a fragment in _Poems of Raleigh_, ed. Hannah, p. 33.)
When Ralegh leaves Elizabeth's presence he tell us his 'forsaken heart'
and his 'withered mind' were 'widowed of all the joys' they 'once
possessed.' Only some 500 lines (the twenty-first book and a fragment of
another book) survive of Ralegh's poem _Cynthia_, the whole of which was
designed to prove his loyalty to the Queen, and all the extant lines are
in the same vein as those I quote. The complete poem extended to
twenty-two books, and the lines exceeded 10,000, or five times as many as
in Shakespeare's sonnets. Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem of
_Cynthia_, 1595, and Fulke Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also
extravagantly described the Queen's beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John
Davies, poet and lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty-six
years old, thus:

Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit
You give such lively life, such quickening power,
Such sweet celestial influences to it
As keeps it still in youth's immortal flower . . .
O many, many years may you remain
A happy angel to this happy land (_Nosce Teipsum_, dedication).

Davies published in the same year twenty-six 'Hymnes of Astrea' on
Elizabeth's beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the words
'Elizabetha Regina,' and the language of love is simulated on almost
every page.

{138a} _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62.

{138b} Adulatory sonnets to patrons are met with in the preliminary or
concluding pages of numerous sixteenth and seventeenth century books
(_e.g._ the collection of sonnets addressed to James VI of Scotland in
hi