Seventeenthcentury studies Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THOMAS LODGE. IF a full and continuous biography of Thomas Lodge could be recovered, it would possess as much interest to a student of Elizabethan manners and... more » letters as any Memoir that cart be imagined. It would combine, in a series of pictures, scenes from all the principal conditions of life in that stirring and vigo'rous age. It would introduce us to the stately civic life of London city, to Oxford in the early glow of humanism and liberal thought, to the dawn of professional literature in London, to the life of a soldier against Spain, to the adventures of a freebooting sailor on the high seas, to the poetry of the age, and then to its science, to the stage in London and to the anatomical lecture-room in Avignon, to the humdrum existence of a country practitioner, and to the perilous intrigues of a sympathiser with Catholicism trembling on the verge of treason. Lodge is therefore in many respects a typical figure. His genius, from the purely literary point of view, is sufficiently considerable to make him interesting in himself, and to give him a noticeable presence in the shifting pageant of the times. But what mainly distinguishes him from four or five other composers of delicate lyrics and amorous romances is the length and picturesque variety of his career. Of this career, unhappily, we possess but the outline.) A few dates in wills or at the close ofprefaces, a few nimble conjectures, a page of biography in the Athena: of Anthony a Wood, these we have to piece together as best we may, and to endeavour to recover from them the lost presence of a man; nor are we without this consolation, that, I for an Elizabethan poet, Lodge stands out before us at last with some measure of distinctness.- The year of the birth of Thomas Lodge is a matter of pure conjecture. At th...« less