Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke; but he follows the discoverer of this undoubted fact, Mr. Bright, no further. As to the way in which the sonnets reached the press, Mr. Corney submits a new theory. Be it assumed that the volume of sonnets was a transcript made by order of William Herbert; that it was then inscribed by him to the Earl of Southampton as a giftbook, and that it afterwards came into the possession of the publisher in a manner which required concealment. With this theory, which the inscription and other peculiarities of the volume seem to justify, the perplexities of the question vanish. I anticipate one objection. As copies of the sonnets were in the hands of the private friends of the poet, a copy was surely in the hands of his patron. How then could 'W. H.' offer the earl so superfluous a gift? It might have been a substitute for a lost copy, or a revised text, or a specimen of penmanship, as it was a common enough thing for specimens of the caligraphic art to be offered as gift-books.' Thus, he holds that the sense of the inscription is :-To the only begetter (the Earl of Southampton) of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H. (William Herbert) wishes all happiness, and that eternity promised (to him) by our ever-living poet. This was the private inscription, in imitation of the lapidary style, written on the private which had been executed for the purpose of precopy senting to the Earl; and Thorpe, in making the sonnets public, let this dedication stand, merely adding that the 'well-wishing adventurer in setting forth' was 'T. T.'

There have been various minor and incidental notices of the sonnets, which show that the tendency in our time is to look on them as autobiographic. Mr. Henry Taylor, in his Notes from Books,' speaks of those sonnets in which Shakspeare reproaches Fortune and himself, in a strain, which shows how painfully conscious he was that he had lived unworthily of his doubly immortal spirit.'

MR. MASSON-ULRICI.

15

Mr. Masson states resolutely, that the sonnets are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a record of the Poet's own feelings and experience during a certain period of his London life; that they are distinctly, intensely, painfully autobiographic. He thinks they express our poet in his most intimate and private relations to man and nature as having been 'William the Melancholy,' rather than William the Calm,' or 'William the Cheerful.'

The sonnets seem to have placed Ulrici in that difficult position which the Americans describe as facing North by South.' To him the fact that Shakspeare passed his life in so modest a way and left so little report, is evidence of the calmness with which the majestic stream of his mental development flowed on, and of the clear pure atmosphere which breathed about his soul. Yet, we may see in the sonnets many traces of the painful struggles it cost him to maintain his moral empire. His mind was a fountain of free fresh energy, yet the sonnets show how he fell into the deeps of painful despondency, and felt utterly wretched. They tell us that he had a calm consciousness of his own greatness, and also that he held fame and applause to be empty, mean, and worthless. This is Ulrici's cross-eyed view. He reads the sonnets as personal confessions, and he concludes that Shakspeare must have been so sincere a Christian, that being also a mortal man, and open to temptation, he, having fallen and risen up a conqueror over himself, to prove that he is not ashamed of anything, set the matter forth as a warning to the world, and offered himself up as a sacrifice for the good of others, most especially for the behoof of the young Earl of Pembroke, for, according to Ulrici he alone can be the person addressed.

Gervinus, in his Commentaries on Shakspeare, holds

1 Essays, chiefly on English Poets.

that the sonnets were not originally intended for publication, and that 126 of them are addressed to a friend; the last 28 bespeaking a relation with some light-minded woman. It is quite clear to him that they are addressed to one and the same youth, as even the last 28, from their purport, relate to the one connection between Shakspeare and his young friend, and with his fellowcountryman, Regis, who translated the sonnets into German, Gervinus considers that these should properly be arranged with sonnets 40-42. He maintains that the real name of the only begetter' was not designated by the publisher, the initials W. H. were only meant to mislead. That this Begetter' is the same man whom the 38th sonnet calls in a similar sense the Tenth Muse,' and whom the 78th sonnet enjoins to be 'most proud' of the poet's works, because their influence is his, and born of him. He does not believe that the Earl of Pembroke could be the person addressed, the age of the earl and the period at which the sonnets were written, making it an impossibility. He thinks the Earl of Southampton is the person, he being early a patron of the drama, and a nobleman so much looked up to by the poets and writers of the time, that they vied with each other in dedicating their works to him. Gervinus is of opinion that a portion of sonnet 53 directly alludes to the poems which the poet had inscribed to the earl, and that he points out how much his friend's English beauty transcends that old Greek beauty of person, which the poet had attempted to describe, and set forth newly attired in his Venus and Adonis.' This foreign critic wonders why in England the identity of the object of these sonnets with the Earl of Southampton should have been so much opposed. To him it is simply incomprehensible, for, if ever a supposition bordered on certainty, he holds it to be this.

THE LATEST THEORY.

17

A strenuous endeavour not to read the sonnets has recently been made by a German, named Bernstorff, and it is out of sight more successful than any attempt yet made to read them. It is so immeasurably far-reaching, so unfathomably profound, that we may call it perfectly successful. This author has discovered that the sonnets are a vast Allegory, in which Shakspeare has masked his own face; he has here kept a diary of his inner self, not in a plain autobiographic way, but by addressing and playing a kind of bo-peep with his doppleganger. For the sonnets do not speak to beings of flesh and blood, no Earls of Southampton or Pembroke, no Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth Vernon, no corporeal being, in short, no body whatever, but Shakspeare's own soul or his genius or his art.

It is Shakspeare who in the 1st sonnet is the only herald to the blooming spring' of modern literature, and the world's fresh ornament. The beast that bears' the speaker in sonnet 51 is the poet's animal nature. The * sweet roses that do not fade' in sonnet 54 are his dramas. The praises so often repeated are but the poet's enthusiasm for his inner self. All this is proved by the dedication, which inscribes the sonnets to their 'only begetter,' W. H.-William Himself. The critic has freed the Shakspearian Psyche from her sonnet film, and finds that she has shaken off every particle of the concrete to soar on beautiful wings, with all her inborn loveliness unfolded, into the empyrean of pure abstraction! There sits the poet sublimely pinnacled, dim in the intense inane,' at the highest altitude of self-consciousness, singing his song of self-worship; contemplating the heights, and depths, and proportions of the great vast of himself, and as he looks over centuries on centuries of years he sees and prophesies that the time will yet come when the world will gaze on his genius with as much awe as he feels for it now. Is this vanity and self-conceit?'

C

the critic asks, and he answers, Not a whit, simple truthful self-perception!' Into this region has he followed Shakspeare, where human mortals' could not possibly breathe. He keeps up pretty well, self-inflated, for some time, but at length, before the flight is quite finished, our critic gives one gasp, showing that he is mortal after all, and down he drops dead-beaten in the middle of the latter sonnets.

The mind of Shakspeare is a vast ocean teeming with life, and his works, critically considered, afford an oceanic space and range for every sort of creature and mental species that come to sport or make sport in this great deep. Also, the sonnets have caused much perplexity and bewilderment, as is sufficiently reflected in the present account, but of all the strange things that have taken advantage of the largeness and the liberty, this author is surely the oddest. His theory is a creation worthy of Shakspeare's own humour, sincere past all perception of foolishness. What we require is the secret cue to his profundity, at which we can but dimly guess. It may be that he has explored the Shakspearian ocean so determinedly and dived so desperately, that he has found the very place where, as is popularly supposed of the sea, there is no bottom, and he has gone right through headlong!