He used the Italian and the English form in about an
equal number of cases but he experiments on a large variety of
rime-arrangements besides.
As to the personality honoured under the name of Diana, there seems to
be much obscurity. From the sonnet _To his Mistress_, we learn that
though he addresses several he loves but one.
"Grace full of grace, though in these verses here
My love complains of others than of thee,
Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me,
Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were."
So he loved her, it seems, while she was "yet unknown," something quite
possible in the sonneteer's world: and her personality, though shadowed
under various names, is to the poet a distinct conception. To the honour
of being this poet's inspirer, there are two claimants; one the Lady
Rich, the Stella of Sidney, the other the ill-fated Arabella Stuart. It
is noteworthy that the only one of all the sonnets addressed personally
to particular ladies that is retained in the edition of 1594, is one to
Lady Rich. But this sonnet tells us little except that "wished fortune"
had once made it possible for him to see her in all her beauty of roses
and lilies, stars and waves of gold: but this might have happened if he
had once seen that beauteous lady pass along the street in the queen's
glittering train. Other sonnets to or about the Lady Rich are equally
uncommunicative; and if the ill-starred Penelope Devereux is the one
alone that Constable loved, Time has shut the secret tightly in his
heart and will not give it up.
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