s _Essayes of a Prentise_, 1591, and the sonnets to noblemen before
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, at the end of Chapman's _Iliad_, and at the
end of John Davies's _Microcosmos_, 1603). Other sonnets to patrons are
scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson's
_Forest_ and _Underwoods_ and Donne's _Poems_. Sonnets addressed to men
are not only found in the preliminary pages, but are occasionally
interpolated in sonnet-sequences of fictitious love. Sonnet xi. in
Drayton's sonnet-fiction called 'Idea' (in 1599 edition) seems addressed
to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his
hero; and a few others of Drayton's sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex
of their subject. John Soothern's eccentric collection of love-sonnets,
_Pandora_ (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and
William Smith in his _Chloris_ (1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the
conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the
substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser.
Throughout Europe 'dedicatory' sonnets or poems to women betray identical
characteristics to those that were addressed to men. The poetic
addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of
Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are always affectionate, often
amorous, in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare's
sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem _The Pilgrimage to
Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke's Love_, 1592, and another
work of his, _The Countess of Pembroke's Passion_ (first printed from
manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary
patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic
utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the
sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place
their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the
same class. They both merely display a _protege's_ loyalty to his
patron, couched, according to current convention, in the strongest
possible terms of personal affection. In Italy and France exactly the
same vocabulary of adoration was applied by authors indifferently to
patrons and patronesses. It is known that one series of Michael Angelo's
impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei
Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but
the tone is t