[103a] Eight of Watson’s sonnets are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell’ Aquila (1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?-1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl. 1548), and Æneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic ‘Argonautica’); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus; or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus.
[103b] No importance can be attached to Drayton’s pretensions to greater originality than his neighbours. The very line in which he makes the claim (‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’) is a verbatim theft from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney.
[103c] Lodge’s Margarite, p. 79. See Appendix IX. for the text of Desportes’s sonnet (Diane, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge’s translation in Phillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Desportes—in his romance of Rosalind (Hunterian Society’s reprint, p. 74), and in his volume of poems called Scillaes Metamorphosis (p. 44). Sonnet xxxiii. of Lodge’s Phillis is rendered with equal literalness from Ronsard. But Desportes was Lodge’s special master,
[104a] See Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses’ Library, 1894, i. 207 seq.
[104b] Sève’s Délie was first published at Lyons in 1544.
[104c] 1530-1579.
[105] In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in 1594 edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton hints that his ‘fair Idea’ embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his acquaintance, and he repeats the hint in two other short poems; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in 1594 edition.
Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . .
Only I call [i.e. I call only] on my divine Idea.
Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in addressing sonnets to ‘L’Idée,’ left the reader in no doubt of his intent by concluding one poem thus:
Là, ô mon âme, au plus hault ciel guidée,
Tu y pourras recognoistre l’Idée
De la beauté qu’en ce monde j’adore.(Du Bellay’s Olive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)