least, no whisper had been breathed against Lady Rich.  In 1600 we have the first notice of her losing the queen’s favor from a suspicion of her infidelity to her husband, and in 1605, having been divorced, her lover, the earl of Devonshire, formerly Lord Mountjoy, immediately married her.  He defended her in an eloquent Discourse and an Epistle to the King, in which he says:  “A lady of great birth and virtue, being in the power of her friends, was by them married against her will unto one against whom she did protest at the very solemnity and ever after.”  Lord Rich treated her with great brutality, and having ceased to live with her for twelve years, “did by persuasions and threatenings move her to consent unto a divorce, and to confess a fault with a nameless stranger.”  In spite of Mountjoy’s noble pleadings for his wife, the whole court rose up against his marriage.  The earl’s sensitive heart was broken by the disgrace he had brought upon one whom he had loved so dearly and so long (for he was Sidney’s rival in his early youth, and had been rejected by Lady Penelope’s family before her marriage with Lord Rich), and he died of grief four months after their marriage, April 3, 1606.  His countess, “worn out with lamentation,” did not long survive him.

Does that look like the conduct of a light and fickle heart? or was it likely that so noble a man as Charles Mountjoy would have died of grief for the disgrace he had brought upon a notoriously bad woman?  As to Lord Southampton’s alleged flirtation with Lady Rich, which so excited Elizabeth Vernon’s jealousy, Mr. Massey has not one circumstance in proof of it but the forced interpretation he chooses to put upon certain lines of certain sonnets which he has wrested from their proper places, as well as their proper meaning.  After using such sonnets as the 144th to express this jealousy, he quietly confesses at the end of the chapter that it could not have gone very deep, as the intimacy of the two fair cousins (for such was their relationship) continued to be of the closest—­that it was to Lady Rich’s house that Elizabeth Vernon retired after her secret marriage to the earl in 1598, and there her baby was born, named Penelope after her cousin and friend!  There was only matter enough in it for poetry, Mr. Massey concludes after having upset the whole order of the Sonnets to prove its reality.

Now, as to the story of Lady Rich’s having been the mistress of Herbert, for whom Mr. Massey says that twenty-four of the Sonnets were written.  William Herbert, afterward earl of Pembroke, was born in 1580.  He came up to London in 1598, being then eighteen years of age, and made the acquaintance of Shakespeare, who was then thirty-four years old.  Lady Rich, at that time, according to Mr. Massey’s own statement, was “getting on for forty.”  The fact is that she was just thirty-five, having been born, as he tells us, in 1563.  According to the obvious meaning of the Sonnets, the lady spoken