on a Friday,’ and the final poem is headed ‘Ultimo Sonnetto.’ In 1594 appeared a second edition, under the title of ‘Diana, or the excellent conceitful sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages. Divided into viii. Decades,’ London (by James Roberts for Richard Smith). A perfect copy is at the Bodleian; an imperfect one at the British Museum. The date on the title-page is in most copies misprinted 1584 for 1594. The collection includes all the sonnets which had appeared in the first edition except the opening one, ‘To his absent Diana,’ but they are mingled with new matter, and no attempt is made to preserve the original order. The edition is prefaced by a sonnet, signed Richard Smith, ‘Unto her Majesty's sacred honourable Maids,’ and includes seventy-six sonnets in all, the eighth decade including only five, while on the last page is printed the unnumbered sonnet from the first edition dated 1588. Seven sonnets in ‘the third decade’ and one in the fourth were rightly printed as Sir Philip Sidney's compositions in the appendix to the third edition of the ‘Arcadia’ in 1598. The volume was doubtless a bookseller's venture in which many poets besides Constable are represented. Other editions are referred by bibliographers to 1604 and 1607, but no copy of either is known. Two facsimiles of the second edition were issued in 1818, one by the Roxburghe Club, under the direction of Edward Littledale, and Professor Arber reprinted it in 1877 in his ‘English Garner,’ ii. 225–64.
Whether ‘Diana,’ the reputed inspirer of Constable's verse, is more than a poet's fiction or an ideal personage—the outcome of many experiences—is very doubtful. Critics have pointed to Constable's cousin, Mary, countess of Shrewsbury (her husband was Constable's second cousin on his mother's side), as the lady whom the poet addressed; one or two sonnets, on the other hand, confirm the theory that Penelope, lady Rich, Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Stella,’ is the subject of the verse, but the difficulty of determining the authorship of any particular sonnet renders these suggestions of little service to Constable's biographer. Todd discovered another small collection of sonnets in manuscript at Canterbury, bearing Constable's name, and Park printed these in the supplement to the ‘Harleian Miscellany’ (1813), ix. 491. They are addressed to various noble ladies of the writer's acquaintance, including Mary, countess of Pembroke; Anne, countess of Warwick; Margaret, countess of Cumberland; Penelope, lady Rich; and Mary, countess of Shrewsbury. In Park's ‘Heliconia’ were published for the first time sixteen other sonnets attributed to Constable, entitled ‘Spirituall Sonnettes to the Honour of God and hys Sayntes, by H. C.,’ printed from the Harleian MS. No. 7553. Constable contributed a sonnet that was very famous in its day to King James's ‘Poetical Exercises,’ 1591; four sonnets (‘To Sir Philip Sidney's Soule’) to the 1595 edition of Sidney's ‘Apologie for Poetry;’ four pastoral poems to ‘England's Helicon’ (1600), one of which—‘The Shepheard's Song of Venus and Adonis’—(according to Malone) suggested Shakespeare's ‘Venus and Adonis;’ and a sonnet to Bolton's ‘Elements of Armoury,’ 1610. Constable's works were collected and edited by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1859.
Constable's sonnets are too full of quaint conceits to be read nowadays with much pleasure, but his vocabulary and imagery often indicate real passion and poetic feeling. The ‘Spirituall Sonnettes’ breathe genuine religious fervour. His pastoral lyrics are less laboured, and their fresh melody has the true Elizabethan ring. In his own day Constable's poems were curiously popular. Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598) and Edmund Bolton (Hypercritica, in Haslewood, Critical Essays, ii. 250) are very loud in their praises, but the surest sign of his popularity are the lines placed in the mouth of one of the characters in the ‘Returne from Pernassus’ (ed. Macray, p. 85):
Sweate Constable doth take the wandring eare
And layes it up in willing prisonment.
[Hunter's MS. Chorus Vatum in Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 24487, ff. 157–65; Register of Biography, 1869, i. 1 et seq. (by Mr. Thompson Cooper); Corser's Collectanea, iv. 435–8; Ritson's Poets; Lodge's Illustrations, ii. 498–500; State Papers (Dom.), 1584–1601; Thorpe's Scottish State Papers; Constable's letters to Essex and Sir Robert Cecil at Hatfield, kindly communicated by R. T. Gunton, esq.; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. ii. 292, xi. 491, xii. 179; Foster's Yorkshire Pedigrees.]
CONSTABLE, HENRY, Viscount Dunbar (d. 1645), was son of Henry Constable of Burton and Halsham in the West Riding of Yorkshire, sheriff of the county in 1556 and M.P. for Heydon 1585–8 and 1603–8, by Margaret, daughter of Sir William Dormer of Winthorp, Buckinghamshire (Drake, Yorkshire, p. 354; Willis, Not. Parl.) His mother was reputed an obstinate recusant, not to be ‘reformed by any persuasion, or yet by coercion’ (Strype, Annals, fol. iii. ii. 179 ad fin.) On the death of his father in 1608 he succeeded to the family estates. He was knighted at the Tower
