fonnet published in Shakspere's thirty-fifth year; here evidently he cannot have spoken in his own person, and if not here, why elsewhere? Finally, it is afferted that the poems lack internal harmony; no real person can be, what Shakspere's friend is described as being-true and false, constant and fickle, virtuous and vicious, of hopeful expectation and publicly blamed for careless living.

Shakspere speaks of himself as old; true, but in the fonnet published in The Passionate Pilgrim (CXXXVIII.), he speaks as a lover, contrafting himself skilled in the lore of life with an inexperienced youth; doubtless at thirty-five he was not a Florizel nor a Ferdinand. In the poems to his friend, Shakspere is addreffing a young man perhaps of twenty years, in the fresh bloom of beauty; he celebrates with delight the floral grace of youth, to which the first touch of time will be a taint; thofe lines of thought and care, which his own mirror shows, bear witness to time's ravage. It is as a poet that Shakspere writes, and his ftatistics are thofe not of arithmetic but of poetry.

That he should have given admiration and love without measure to a youth highborn, brilliant, accomplished, who fingled out the player for peculiar favour, will seem wonderful only to those who keep a conftant guard upon their affections, and to those who have no need to keep a guard at all. In the Renascence epoch among natural products of a time when life ran fwift and free, touching with its current high and difficult places, the ardent friendship of man with man was one. To elevate it above mere perfonal regard a kind of Neo-Platonism was at hand, which reprefented Beauty and Love incarnated in a human creature as earthly vice-gerents of the Divinity. It was then not uncommon', obferves the fober Dyce, 'for one man to write verses to another in a ftrain of fuch tender affection as fully warrants us in terming them amatory'. Montaigne, not prone to take up extreme pofitions, writes of his dead Eftienne de la Boëtie with paffionate tenderness which will not hear of moderation. The haughtiest spirit of Italy, Michael Angelo, does homage to

the worth and beauty of young Tommaso Cavalieri in fuch words as thefe :

Heavenward your spirit flirreth me to firain; E'en as you will I blush and blanch again, Freeze in the fun, burn 'neath a frosty sky, Your will includes and is the lord of mine.

The learned Languet writes to young Philip Sidney: Your portrait I kept with me fome hours to feaft my eyes on it, but my appetite was rather increased than diminished by the fight'. And Sidney to his guardian friend: 'The chief object of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefeft place'. 'Some', faid Jeremy Taylor, live under the line, and the beams of friendship in that pofition are imminent and perpendicular'. 'Some have only a dark day and a long night from him [the Sun], fnows and white cattle, a miserable life and a perpetual harvest of Catarrhes and Consumptions, apoplexies and dead palfies; but fome have splendid fires and aromatick fpices, rich wines and well

digefted fruits, great wit and great courage, because they dwell in his eye and look in his face and are the Courtiers of the Sun, and wait upon him in his Chambers of the East; just so it is in friendship'. Was Shakspere less a courtier of the fun than Languet or Michael Angelo?

If we accept the obvious reading of the Sonnets, we must believe that Shakspere at fome time of his life was fnared by a woman, the reverse of beautiful according to the conventional Elizabethan standard-dark-haired, darkeyed, pale-cheeked (cxxxII.); skilled in touching the virginal (CXXVIII.); fkilled also in playing on the heart of man; who could attract and repel, irritate and foothe, join reproach with caress (CXLV.); a woman faithlefs to her vow in wedlock (CLII.). Through her no calm of joy came to him; his life ran quicker but more troubled through her spell, and she mingled ftrange bitternefs with its waters. Mistress of herself and of her art, fhe turned when it pleased her from the player to capture a more distinguished prize, his friend.

For a while Shakspere was kept in the

torture of doubt and suspicion; then confeffion and tears were offered by the youth. The wound had gone deep into Shakspere's heart:

Love knows it is a greater grief

To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.

But, delivering himself from the intemperance of wrath, he could forgive a young man beguiled and led aftray. Through further difficulties and estrangements their friendship travelled on to a fortunate repose. The series of Sonnets, which is its record, climbs to a high funlit reftingplace. The other feries, which records his paffion for a dark temptress, is a whirl of moral chaos. Whether to dismiss him, or to draw him farther on, the woman had urged upon him the claims of conscience and duty; in the latest sonnets-if this feries be arranged in chronological order-Shakspere's paffion, grown bitter and fcornful (CLI., CLII.), ftrives, once for all, to defy and wrestle down his better will.

Shakspere of the Sonnets is not the Shakspere ferenely victorious, infinitely charitable, wife with