INTRODUCTION


_Birth and Education._ Of the life of Thomas Lodge comparatively
little is definitely known. Yet, though even the year of his birth is
uncertain, we are able from the meager facts that have come down to us
to see that his life was typically Elizabethan. Like Sidney and like
Raleigh, Lodge lived a varied and active life. He was born in either
1557 or 1558 of a rather prominent middle-class London family, both
his father and his mother's father having been lord mayors of the
city. He was sent to Merchant Taylors' School and afterwards to
Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1577. Of his career at
the university we know almost nothing except that among his fellow
students were John Lyly, destined to exert a powerful influence upon
his style, and George Peele, later to become a dramatist of note, to
whom Lodge may to some extent have owed his subsequent interest in the
drama.

_Early Work._ After leaving Oxford, Lodge returned to London and
entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn, in other words took up the study
of the law. Legal studies seem not to have absorbed his attention to
the total exclusion of literary work. The occasion of his first
publication was the death of his mother in 1579. In that year appeared
the "Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge." This is not extant, but his
reply to Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse" has survived. Gosson's
book had been a furious attack upon the contemporary drama. Lodge's