digested 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 Eaft; juft fo 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.); fkilled in touching the virginal (cxxvII.); fkilled also in playing on the heart of man; who could attract and repel, irritate and foothe, join reproach with caress (CXLV.); a woman faithless 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 strange bitternefs with its waters. Mistress of herself and of her art, she turned when it pleased her from the player to capture a more diftinguished prize, his friend. For a while Shakspere was kept in the

torture of doubt and fufpicion; 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 eftrangements 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.

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

all wisdom of the intellect and the heart, whom we know through The Tempest and King Henry VIII. He is the Shakspere of Venus & Adonis and Romeo & Juliet, on his way to acquire fome of the dark experience of Measure for Measure, and the bitter learning of Troilus & Creffida. Shakfpere's writings affure us that in the main his eye was fixed on the true ends of life; but they do not lead us to believe that he was inacceffible to temptations of the fenfes, the heart, and the imagination. We can only guess the frailty that accompanied fuch ftrength, the risks that attended fuch high powers; immenfe demands on life, vaft ardours, and then the void hour, the deep dejection. There appears to have been a time in his life when the springs of faith and hope had almost ceased to flow; and he recovered these not by flying from reality and life, but by driving his fhafts deeper towards the centre of things. So Ulyffes was transformed into Profpero, worldly wisdom into spiritual infight. Such ideal purity as Milton's was not poffeffed nor fought by Shakfpere; among these

Sonnets, one or two might be spoken by Mercutio, when his wit of cheveril was ftretched to an ell broad. To compenfate--Shakspere knew men and women a good deal better than did Milton, and probably no patches of his life are quite as unprofitably ugly as fome which diffigured the life of the great idealift. His daughter could love and honour Shakfpere's memory. Lamentable it is, if he was taken in the toils, but at least we know that he escaped all toils before the end. May we dare to conjecture that Cleopatra, queen and courtefan, black from Phoebus' amorous pinches', a 'lafs unparalleled', has fome kinship through the imagination with our dark lady of the virginal? Would I had never seen her', fighs out Antony, and the fhrewd onlooker Enobarbus replies, 'O, fir, you had then left unfeen a wonderful piece of work; which not to have been bleft withal would have difcredited your travel'.

Shakspere did not, in Byron's manner, invite the world to gaze upon his trefpafs and his griefs. Setting afide two pieces printed by a

Yet

pirate in 1599, not one of these poems, as far as we know, faw the light until long after they were written, according to the most probable chronology, and when in 1609 the volume entitled 'Shake-speares Sonnets' was iffued, it had, there is reason to believe, neither the superintendence nor the consent of the author.1 their literary merits entitled thefe poems to publication, and Shakspere's verse was popular. If they were written on fanciful themes, why were the Sonnets held fo long in referve? If, on the other hand, they were connected with real perfons, and painful incidents, it was natural that they should not pafs beyond the private friends of their poffeffor.

But the Sonnets of Shakspere, it is faid, lack inward unity. Some might well be addressed to Queen Elizabeth, fome to Anne Hathaway, fome to his boy Hamnet, fome to the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton; it is impoffible to make all these poems (1.-CXXVI.) apply

1 The Quarto of 1609, though not careleffly printed, is far lefs accurate than Venus & Adonis. See note on CXXVI.