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LODGE  . C . LODGE, T . Inn, where, as in the other Inns of Court, a love of letters and a crop of debts and difficulties were alike wont to spring up in 'a kindly soil . Lodge, apparently in disregard of the wishes of his family, speedily showed his inclination towards the looser ways of life and the lighter aspects of literature . When the penitent Stephen Gosson had (in 1579) published his Schoole of Abuse, Lodge took up the glove in his Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580; reprinted for the Shakespeare Society, 1853), which shows a certain restraint, though neither deficient in force of invective nor backward in display of erudition . The pamphlet was prohibited, but appears to have been circulated privately . It was answered by Gosson in his Playes Confuted in Five Actions; and Lodge retorted with his Alarum Against Usurers (1584, reprinted ib.)—a " tract for the times " which no doubt was in some measure indebted to the author's personal experience . In the same year he produced the first tale written by him on his own account in prose and verse, The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria, both published and reprinted with the Alarum . From 1587 onwards he seems to have made a series of attempts as a playwright, though most of those attributed to him are mainly conjectural . That he ever became an actor is improbable in itself, and Collier's conclusion to that effect rested on the two assumptions that the " Lodge " of Henslowe's M.S. was a player and that his name was Thomas, neither of which is supported by the text (see C . M .

Ingleby, Was Thomas Lodge an Actor ? 1868) . Having, in the spirit of his age , " tried the waves " with Captain Clarke in his expedition to Terceira and the Canaries, Lodge in 1591 made a voyage with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, returning home by 1593 . During the Canaries expedition, to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he composed his prose tale of Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, which, printed in 159o, afterwards furnished the story of Shakespeare's As You Like It . The novel, which in its turn owes some, though no very considerable, debt to the medieval Tale of Gamelyn (unwarrantably appended to the fragmentary Cookes Tale in certain MSS. of Chaucer's works), is written in the euphuistic manner, but decidedly attractive both by its plot and by the situations arising from it . It has been frequently reprinted . Before starting on his second expedition he had published an historical romance, The History of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robert the Divell; and he left behind him for publication Cat/taros, Diogenes in his Singularity, a discourse on the immorality of Athens (London) . Both appeared in 1591 . Another romance in the manner of Lyly, Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Sences (1592), appeared while Lodge was still on his travels . His second historical romance, the Life and Death of William Longbeard (1593), was more successful than the first . Lodge also brought back with him from the new world A MargariteofAmerica (published J96), a romance of the same description interspersed with many lyrics . Already in 1589 Lodge had given to the world a volume of poems bearing the title of the chief among them, Scillaes Metamorphosis, Enterlaced with the Unfortunate Love of Glaucus, more briefly known as Claw-us and Scilla (reprinted with preface by S .

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Singer in 1819) . To this tale Shakespeare was possibly indebted for the idea of Venus and Adonis . Some readers would perhaps be prepared to give up this and much else of Lodge's sugared verse, fine though much of it is in quality, largely borrowed from other writers, French and Italian in particular, in exchange for the lost Sailor's Kalendar, in which he must in one way or another have recounted his sea adventures . If Lodge, as has been supposed, was the Alcon in Colin Clout's come Home Again, it may have been the influence of Spenser which led to the composition of Phillis, a volume of sonnets, in which the voice of nature seems only now and then to become audible, published with the narrative poem, The Complaynte of Elstred, in 1593 . A Fig for Momus, on the strength of which he has been called the earliest English satirist, and which contains eclogues addressed to Daniel and others, an epistle addressed to Drayton, and other pieces, appeared in 1595 . Lodge's ascertained dramatic work is small in quantity .