to a fingle person. Difficulties of this kind may perplex a painful commentator, but would hardly

where the

The youth

occur to a lover or a friend living beams of friendship are imminent'. addreffed by Shakspere is the mafter-mistress of his paffion' (xx.); fumming up the perfections of man and woman, of Helen and Adonis (LIII.); a liege, and yet through love a comrade; in years a boy, cherished as a fon might be; in will a man, with all the power which rank and beauty give. Love, aching with its own monotony, invites imagination to invest it in changeful forms. Besides, the varying feelings of at leaft three years (crv.)-three years of lofs and gain, of love, wrong, wrath, forrow, repentance, forgiveness, perfected union-are uttered in the Sonnets. When Shakspere began to write, his friend had the untried innocence of boyhood and an unfpotted fame; afterwards came the offence and the difhonour. And the loving heart practised upon itself the piteous frauds of wounded affection: now it can credit no evil of the beloved, now it must believe the worst.

While the world knows nothing but praise of `one fo dear, a private injury goes deep into the foul; when the world affails his reputation, ftraightway loyalty revives, and even puts a 'ftrain upon itself to hide each imperfection from view.

A painstaking ftudent of the Sonnets, Henry Brown, was of opinion that Shakspere intended in these poems to fatirize the sonnet-writers of his time, and in particular his contemporaries, Drayton and John Davies of Hereford. Profeffor Minto, while accepting the series I.-CXXVI. as of serious import, regards the fonnets addreffed to a woman, CXXVII.-CLII. as exercifes of skill undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace Certainly if

Shakspere is a satirist in 1.-CXXVI., his irony is deep; the malicious smile was not noticed during two centuries and a half. The poems are in the taste of the time; lefs extravagant and less full of conceits than many other Elizabethan collections, more distinguished by exquifite imagination, and all that betokens genuine feeling;

In

they are, as far as manner goes, fuch fonnets as Daniel might have chosen to write if he had had the imagination and the heart of Shakfpere. All that is quaint or contorted or 'conceited in them can be paralleled from paffages of early plays of Shakspere, fuch as Romeo & Juliet, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where affuredly no fatirical intention is discoverable. In the Sonnets CXXVII.-CLIV. Shakspere addreffes a woman to whom it is impoffible to pay the conventional homage of fonneteers; he cannot tell her that her cheeks are lilies and roses, her breast is of fnow, her heart is chaste and cold as ice. Yet he loves her, and will give her tribute of verfe. He praises her precisely as a woman who without beauty is clever and charming, and a coquette, would choose to be praised. True, she owns no commonplace attractions; she is no pink and white goddefs; all her imperfections he fees; yet she can fascinate by fome nameless fpell; fhe can turn the heart hot or cold; if fhe is not beautiful, it is because something more rare and fine takes the place of beauty. She

angers her lover; he declares to her face that she is odious, and at the same moment he is at her feet.

A writer whose diftinction it is to have produced the largest book upon the Sonnets, Mr. Gerald Maffey, holds that he has rescued Shakfpere's memory from shame by the discovery of a fecret history legible in these poems to rightly illuminated eyes.1 In 1592, according to this theory, Shakspere began to address pieces in fonnet-form to his patron Southampton. Prefently the Earl engaged the poet to write love fonnets on his behalf to Elizabeth Vernon; affuming also the feelings of Elizabeth Vernon, Shakspere wrote dramatic fonnets, as if in her person, to the Earl. The table-book containing Shakspere's autograph fonnets was given by Southampton to Pembroke, and at Pembroke's request was written the dark-woman feries; for Pembroke, although authentic history knows nothing of the facts, was enamoured of Sidney's Stella, now well advanced in years, the unhappy 1 The first hint of this theory was given by Mrs. Jamelon.

Lady Rich. A few of the fonnets which pass for Shakspere's are really by Herbert, and he, the Mr. W. H.' of Thorpe's dedication, is the only begetter', that is, procurer of these pieces for the publisher. The Sonnets require rearrangement, and are grouped in an order of his own by Mr. Massey.

Mr. Maffey writes with zeal; with a faith in his own opinions which finds fcepticism hard to explain except on fome theory of intellectual or moral obliquity; and he exhibits a wide, mis(cellaneous reading. The one thing Mr. Maffey's elaborate theory feems to me to lack is fome evidence in its fupport. His arguments may well remain unanswered. One hardly knows how to tug at the other end of a rope of fand. 1 With Wordsworth, Sir Henry Taylor, and Mr. Swinburne, with François-Victor Hugo, with Kreyffig, Ulrici, Gervinus, and Hermann Ifaac,1

1 A learned and thoughtful student of the sonnets, to whom I am indebted for fome valuable notes. See his articles in Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 1878-79.