Where I to thee eternity shall give,
When nothing else remaineth of these days,
And queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise ;
Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes,
Shall be so much delighted with thy story,
That they shall grieve they lived not in these times
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory:
So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng
Still to survive in my immortal song."

"Stay, speedy Time, behold before thou pass,

From age to age, what thou hast sought to see,
One in whom all the excellencies be;
In whom Heaven looks itself as in a glass :
Time, look thou too in this tralucent glass
And thy youth past in this pure mirror see,
As the world's beauty in his infancy,
What it was then, and thou before it was ;-
Pass on, and to posterity tell this;

Yet see thou tell but truly what hath been:
Say to our nephews, that thou once hast seen
In perfect human shape, all heavenly bliss:
And bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee
When she is gone, her like again to see."

VII.-WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE-Sonnets.

After a survey of the huge issue of sonnets between 1591 and 1594, the characteristics of the sonnets of Shakespeare seem to stand out with greater distinctness. They divide themselves into three classes. First come the sonnets of the 'Passionate Pilgrim,' some of which rise out of the relations between Venus and Adonis, and most of which are in the same strain, treating the theme of love with a certain lightness. Next come the twenty-six sonnets placed among his Sonnets so-called, between the 127th and the 152d inclusive: sonnets sufficiently alarming at first sight, but not so very terrible when we examine them boldly. Finally comes the main body of his sonnets, addressed to his friend. These are in every way more powerful and mature. The second and third classes are, as we shall see, strongly contrasted in sentiment with the effusions of preceding sonneteers.

In 1598, one Francis Meres, in a work entitled 'Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury,' eulogised the various English poets, finding parallels for them among the Greek and Latin poets. Among others, he remarked on Shakespeare, and said: "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends," &c. The sonnets published in the

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following year in the Passionate Pilgrim,' which bore Shakespeare's name on the title-page, fully answer this description: 1 they may with sufficient propriety be said to be animated by the sweet witty soul of Ovid. The rest of Shakespeare's sonnets were not published till 1609, when they were issued as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets,' never before imprinted"; and some critics have asseverated with unaccountable confidence that the second issue must be the sonnets spoken of by Meres, although the publication of them had been delayed. There is not the slightest ground for this assertion: " among his private friends cannot be taken to mean "to his private friend." In the sonnets of the 'Passionate Pilgrim' there is quite enough to justify the words of Meres. Besides, Meres seems to have made his comparison with some notion of its meaning, seeing that Venus and "Lucrece at once carry us to the Amores and the Heroides; and in the case of the sonnets addressed to a friend the comparison would be wholly inapplicable. Further, the 107th sonnet, containing the line

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,"

must have been written after the death of Elizabeth, to whose name of "Cynthia " the line is an undoubted reference.

Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are, as I have said, startling at first sight. They are unmistakably addressed to a woman of loose character, and they seem to represent the poet as involved in a disreputable passion. But when we look more closely into them, we begin to suspect that, if those sonnets are to be treated as bearing all on one subject, we do wrong to take too serious a view of them. One must not treat published sonnets addressed to a courtesan as earnest private correspondence, or as grave confessions whispered in the ear of a ghostly counsellor. I believe that the proper view is to regard them as exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace. When young Hal was told of his father's triumphs, the humorous youth indulged in a curious eccentricity, which, if I am not in error, represents exactly the spirit of these sonnets

"His answer was, he would unto the stews,

And from the commonest creature pluck a glove,
And wear it as a favour; and with that

He would unhorse the lustiest challenger."

Now those who have gone through the overwhelming mass of 1 Part, at least, of the Passionate Pilgrim' was composed by Shakespeare. See Mr Collier's remarks on the subject. I should be disposed to assent to nearly all, if not all, that Messrs Clark and Wright have published as Shakespeare's under that title. (See under "Marlowe.") The name "sonnet" was not confined to quatorzains; several of the Passionate Pilgrim's sonnets are in the six-line staves used in Watson's "Passionate Century of Love."

sonnets poured out about the time when Shakespeare began to write sonnets in admiring praise and mournful blame of Stella, Delia, Diana, Phyllis, and Idea-will not be slow to understand, if not to sympathise with, the wanton outburst of impatient genius. The new sonneteer lays down a humorous challenge-Give place, ye lovers, who boast of beauty and virtue: my mistress is neither fair nor faithful, yet I can praise her with as much zeal and fury as the best of you—

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My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight,

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go:

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she, belied by false compare.

He is no tame admirer and adorer, seeing nothing in his mistress but perfection: he woos with a bolder cheer. He tells her plainly that he does not love her with his eyes, for they see in her a thousand errors: yet his heart loves her in spite of them (cxli.) He speculates on the cause of the lover's blindness: concludes that it comes from watching and tears and apostrophises the cunning of Love in thus hiding his mistress's imperfections (cxlviii.) When she swears that she is made of truth, he believes her-although he knows that she lies (cxxxviii.) He must surely be frantic mad to swear her fair and think her bright when she is black as hell and dark as night (cxlvii.) His complaints of unkindness and allegations of cruelty might easily pass as serious, did not the other sonnets reveal the humorous mockery: yet they are not without the jocular touch. He complains of unkindness with a leniency hardly consistent with serious passion-

"Tell me thou lovest elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside."

That is to say, do whatever you please behind my back, but do not ogle other men before my eyes (cxxxix.) He accuses her of pride and cruelty, but warns her not to carry it too far-lest he dowhat commit suicide? no, but—

"Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain."

Two or three of the series, and particularly cxxviii., praise the lady without obvious mockery, yet with a certain gay familiarity. The only sonnet of the series radically inconsistent with this theory is the 146th. Down to the 143d the gay defiant tone is unmistakable: two or three after that are uncertain and equivocal, and the 146th seems unmistakably serious. Must we then give up the theory? I think not. There is an obvious explanation which one may produce without being liable to a charge of sophistry; and that is, that Shakespeare, having taken up the relation between a lover and a courtesan originally in wanton humorous defiance of somewhat lackadaisical effusions, his dramatic instinct could not be restrained from pursuing the relationship farther into more serious aspects.

He

The sonnets addressed to a friend-a young nobleman, apparently, whose bounty the poet has experienced, and whose personal gifts and graces he admires with impassioned fondness-depart very strikingly from the sonnets of Shakespeare's predecessors. ceases to reiterate Petrarch's woes, and opens up a new vein of feeling. Love is still the argument-love's fears and confidences, crosses and triumphs-but it is love for a different object under different conditions. We find in Shakespeare's sonnets most of the commonplaces of the course of true love, coldness and reconciliation, independence and devoted submission, but they are transferred to the course of impassioned friendship, and thereby transfigured. Are, then, these moods of impassioned friendship real or feigned, utterances from the heart, or artificial creations to break the monotony of the language and imagery of passionate admiration between the sexes? Some modern critics would have us believe that the theme is not friendship in any shape, real or feigned the sentiment of the sonnets, they say, is too warm to be inspired except by the charms of woman: Shakespeare could not have admired beauty so fondly in any youth however beautiful. These critics maintain that the sonnets must have been addressed to a woman and Coleridge went the length of saying that one sonnet where the sex is indisputable must have been introduced as a blind.1 All this is the mere insanity of critical dogmatism, maintained in defiance of the most obtrusive facts. Mr Gerald Massey, not being able to get over masculine pronouns and other indications of gender, but still unwilling to admit that some of the sonnets could have been addressed to a man, professes to distinguish between sonnets of friendship and sonnets of sexual love, and redistributes them accordingly. In sonnets addressed unequivocally to his youthful friend, it is, says Mr Massey, manly

1 This is hardly less curious than the amiable Opium-eater's notion that Hamlet's character was exceedingly like his own.

beauty that the poet extols. What, then, are we to make of Sonnet iii., where the young man is told—

"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime"?

Mr Massey draws the line between manly beauty and womanly beauty at whiteness of hand and fragrance of breath: when Shakespeare praises these points of beauty, he must be addressing a woman.1 Yet in Sonnet cvi. Shakespeare ascribes "sweet beauty's best" without distinction to ladies and lovely knights—

"When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express'd
Ev'n such a beauty as you master now."

Further, Mr Massey, if I mistake not, ascribes to the friend Sonnet liii. containing these lines

"Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you;

On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,

And you in Grecian tires are painted new."

And when we look to the description of Adonis we find such lines as

And

"Once more the ruby-coloured portal opened
That to his mouth did honey passage yield.'

"Who when he lived his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet."

It is bad enough to defy all indications of gender and declare that none of these sonnets were addressed to a young man: it is perhaps worse to say that some are and some are not, and to make an arbitrary selection, taking one's own feelings as the exact measure of the poet's. Admiration of the personal beauty of his friend is too closely woven into the sonnets to be detached in this way. They are interpenetrated with it: it is expressed as warmly in sonnets when the sex happens to be unequivocal, as in others where the rashness of dogmatic ingenuity is restrained by no such accident.

1 Gilderoy, in the ballad, is said to have a breath as sweet as rose, and a hand fairer than any lady's, and yet he was a manly youth whom none dared meet single-handed, and who "bauldly bare away the gear of many a Lawland loon."