Born at Newark, England, 1562: died at Liège, Belgium, Oct. 9, 1613. An English poet, son of Sir Robert Constable of Newark. He was graduated at Cambridge (St. John’s College) in 1580; became a Roman Catholic; and for the greater part of his later life resided in Paris occupied with political affairs, and especially with schemes for promoting the interests of Catholicism. In 1603 he came to London, and was for a short time confined in the Tower. He published in 1592 a collection of 23 sonnets entitled “Diana: the Praises of his Mistress in certaine sweete Sonnets by H. C.”

  Noble Henry Constable was a great master in English tongue, nor had any gentleman of our nation a more pure, quick, or higher delivery of conceit, witness among all other that Sonnet of his before his Majesty’s Lepanto.

  He was highly praised by Edmond Bolton, Ben Jonson, and others, and Mr. Warton mentions him as “a noted sonnet writer;” yet the following, though as notable sonnets as his “Diana” could furnish, can hardly entitle him to be denominated “the first sonneteer of his time.”

  Few men of his day enjoyed a higher reputation, especially as a sonnet-writer, than Henry Constable; yet, as far as is known, it was built upon a very narrow foundation.

  The slight but graceful genius of Constable is best defined by some of the epithets which his contemporary critics employed. They spoke of his “pure, quick, and high delivery of conceit.” Ben Jonson alludes to his “ambrosiac muse.” His secular poems are “Certaine sweete sonnets in the praise of his mistress, Diana,” conceived in the style of Ronsard and the Italians. The verses of his later days, when he had learned, as he says, “to live alone with God,” are also sonnets in honour of the saints, and chiefly of Mary Magdalene. They are ingenious, and sometimes too cleverly confuse the passions of divine and earthly love…. Constable was neither more nor less than a fair example of a poet who followed rather than set the fashion. His sonnets were charged and overladen with ingenious conceits, but the freshness, the music, of his more free and flowing lyrics remain, and keep their charm.

  Like Daniel, Constable does not attempt the delineation of stormy passions, yet his deepest vein is quite different from Daniel’s. He has a more ardent soul than Daniel; his imagination is more warmly and richly coloured: he has more of flame and less of moisture in him. Daniel’s words flow most abundantly and with happiest impulse when his eye is dim with tears; Constable’s when his whole being is aglow with the rapture of beauty.

  Henry Constable, whose “Diana” reached a second edition in 1594, was highly commended as a sonneteer by his contemporaries; but the specimens of his handwork which have come down to us in the collections do not justify their commendations.

  He was a close friend of Sidney, many of whose sonnets were published with his, and his work has much of the Sidneian colour, but with fewer flights of happily expressed fancy.

  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…. 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.

  Like all the Petrarchists, his aim was to discover some new metaphysical idea about love, to embody it in a sensible image, and to wind up the sonnet with an epigram. It is needless to say that, as the “metaphysics” of the subject had been long since exhausted, all that he was really in quest of was images and epigrams.