PREFACE. THOMAS Lodge is said by Wood to have been of a Lincolnshire family, and was probably born about the year 1556. In 1573 he made his entry into the University of Oxford, and became a Servitor or Scholar of Trinity College, "under the learned and virtuous Sir Edward Hobbye." Here his talent for verse soon discovered itself, and he was known and distinguished as an excellent scholar, and successful votary of the Muse. It should seem that he soon after quitted his peaceful studies for a more adventurous life, and made a voyage with Captain Clarke to the Canaries*, and probably another with Cavendisht. During the leisure afforded * "being myselfe first a student, and afterwards falling from bookes to armes. Having with Captaine Clarke made a voyage to the Ilands of Terceras and the Canaries, to beguile the time with labour, I writ this booke: rough as hatcht in the stormes of the ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perillous seas."-Dedication to the Lord of Hunsdon," Euphues." Edit. 1592. +"Touching the place where I wrote this, it was in those straits christened by Magelan; in which place to the southward many wonderous Iles, many strange fishes, many monstrous Patagones withdrew my senses; briefly, many bitter and extreme frosts at midsummer continually clothe and clad the discomfortable mountaines."-Dedica tion to the Lady Russell, Margarite of America, 1596. In the address "to the Gentlemen Readers" prefixed to the same work, he says: "Som foure yeres since being at sea with M: Candish (whose memorie if I repent not, I lament not) it was my chance in the librarie of the Iesuits in Sanctum to find this historie in the Spanish tong." him at sea, he exercised his invention in the production of one or two of the novels which he gave to the world on his return. He is said by Wood to have studied medicine at Avignon, and to have taken his degree of Doctor in that faculty there: thus abandoning the unproductive life of a poet, and wisely embracing the more profitable one of a Physician, but possibly rather from necessity than choice*. The dedication to one of his pieces, in 1596, is dated "from my house at Low Laiton in Essex but he appears to have been ultimately settled in London, and to have practised very extensively in his profession. It is presumed that he was a catholic, as he was much patronised by persons of that religion. He dwelt in 1603, in Warwick Lane, and complains, in the preface to his "Treatise of the Plague," of the annoyance he met with from an advertising quack, who had become his neighbour, and put forth bills promising miracles. "At the first he underwrit not his billes, every one that red them came flocking to me, conjuring me by great profers and perswasions to store them with my promised preservatives. These importunities of theirs made me both agreeved, and amazed; agreeved because of that loathsome imposition which was laid upon me, to make myselfe vendible, (which is vnworthy a liberall and gentle minde, much more ill beseeming a phisitian and philosopher, who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so abjectly, but be a contemner of base and servile desire of mony," &c. He afterwards resided on Lambert Hill, and not long before his death * In the title to "Glaucus and Scilla, 1589," and to "Catharos Diogenes, in his singularitie," 1591, he stiles himself "T. L. of Lincoln's Inne, Gent." so that he may have previously intended applying himself to the law as a profession. He is also thus designated in the title to "A Fig for Momus."-1595, |