Among the other "perticulars" addressed, the
Queen is of course bounteously favoured, and a number of ladies of her
Court are honoured; the series therefore lacks all pretense of unity. In
fact, the title of the 1594 edition declares that the "excellent
conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable" are "augmented with divers
quartorzains of honourable and learned personages;" and Sidney has been
found to be one of the "honourable and learned personages" whose works
were laid under contribution to make the book; but since the whole first
and second decades are the same as in the earlier volume by "H.C." which
contained also the King James sonnets attributed by numerous
contemporaries to Henry Constable, and since as yet, beside the ten by
Sidney, no more of the sonnets have by antiquarian research been traced
to their sources in the mazes of Elizabethan common-place books, it
seems but fair to leave the _Diana_ of 1594 in the hands of Constable.
All three books, the '92 and '94 editions and the manuscript volume,
show a like taste for orderly arrangement not found in general in the
sonnet-cycles.
Constable was a Cambridge man and was thirty years old when the _Diana_
was first printed. He lived until 1613 and bore an excellent reputation
in his day. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, who speaks of his
"ambrosaic Muse," of Sidney, Harington, Tofte, and other literary men.
If toying with the sonnet in _Diana_ seems to indicate a light and
trifling spirit, we have to yield that with Constable as with Fletcher
the graver matters of state policy formed the chief interest in life to
the author.
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