he same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the
critic to distinguish between the two series. Only one English
contemporary of Shakespeare published a long series of sonnets addressed
to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional
patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poem _Cynthia_ a set
of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth
called Ganymede. These poems do not belong to the same category as
Shakespeare's, but to the category of sonnet-sequences of love in which
it was customary to invoke a fictitious mistress. Barnfield explained
that in his sonnets he attempted a variation on the conventional practice
by fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil's
_Eclogues_, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy
Alexis.

{140a} Cf. Sonnet lix.

Show me your image in some antique book . . .
Oh sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

{140b} Campion's _Poems_, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare's
sonnets:

O how I faint when I of you do write.--(lxxx. 1.)
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise.--(lxxxii. 6.)

{141} Donne's _Poems_ (in Muses' Library), ii. 34. See also Donne's
sonnets and verse-letters to Mr. Rowland Woodward and Mr. I. W.

{142} See p. 386 note 1.

{143a} Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers
allotted to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, _Sonnets pour
Helene_ (No. xiv.), beginning: 'Trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeil me
tient pris.'

{143b} Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after
the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' who 'wears the rose of youth'
(_Antony and Cleopatra_, III. ii. 17 seq.) Spenser in his _Astrophel_
apostrophises Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his
thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. 133) and 'luckless boy' (l.
142). Conversely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to
exaggerate their own age. See p. 86, note.

{144} Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, are at
Welbeck Abbey, and are described above. Of the remaining seven
paintings, two are assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early
middle age; one, a half-length, a very charming picture, now belongs to
James Knowles, Esq., of Queen Anne's Lodge; the other, a full-length in
drab doublet and hose, is in the Sha