[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 Hélène (No. xiv.), beginning: ‘Trois ans sont ja passez que ton œil me tient pris.’
[143b] Octavius Cæsar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the ‘boy Cæsar’ 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 Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. Mireveldt twice painted the Earl at a later period of his career; one of the pictures is now at Woburn Abbey, the property of the Duke of Bedford, the other is at the National Portrait Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master’s Lodge at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert’s collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belong respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, Bart. (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to best advantage in the one by Van Somer belonging to Mr. James Knowles.
[145] I describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which the Duke kindly permitted me to make.
[146a] Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet iii.:
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
[146b] Southampton’s singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off owing to the lateness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated by ‘pulling off some of the Earl’s locks.’ On the incident being reported to the Queen, she ‘gave Willoughby, in the presence, thanks for what he did’ (Sydney Papers, ii. 83).
[148a] These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle’s England’s Mourning Garment, London, 1603).
[148b] Gervase Markham’s Honour in her Perfection, 1624.