all wisdom of the intelle&t and the heart, whom we know through The Tempeft and King Henry VIII. He is the Shakfpere 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 senses, the heart, and the imagination. We can only guefs 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 shafts 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 Shakspere; among these

Sonnets, one or two might be spoken by Mercutio, when his wit of cheveril was stretched to an ell broad. To compenfate--Shakfpere 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 idealist. His daughter could love and honour Shakspere'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? had never seen her', fighs out Antony, and the fhrewd onlooker Enobarbus replies, 'O, fir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work; which not to have been bleft withal would have difcredited your travel'.

Would I

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

pirate in 1599, not one of these poems, as far as we know, saw the light until long after they were written, according to the most probable chronology, and when in 1609 the volume entitled " 'Shake-fpeares Sonnets was iffued, it had, there is reason to believe, neither the superintendence nor the consent of the author.1 Yet their literary merits entitled these poems to publication, and Shakspere's verfe 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 pass beyond the private friends of their poffeffor.

But the Sonnets of Shakspere, it is said, lack inward unity. Some might well be addressed to Queen Elizabeth, some 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 16c9, though not carelessly printed, is far lefs accurate than Venus & Adonis. See note on cxxvI.

to a single person. Difficulties of this kind may perplex a painful commentator, but would hardly occur to a lover or a friend living where the beams of friendship are imminent'. The youth 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. Befides, the varying feelings of at least three years (CIV.)-three years of lofs and gain, of love, wrong, wrath, forrow, repentance, forgiveness, perfected union-are uttered in the Sonnets. When Shakfpere 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 strain upon itself to hide each imperfection from view.

A painstaking ftudent of the Sonnets, Henry Brown, was of opinion that Shakfpere intended in these poems to fatirize the fonnet-writers of his time, and in particular his contemporaries, Drayton and John Davies of Hereford. Profeffor Minto, while accepting the series 1.-CXXVI. as of ferious import, regards the fonnets addreffed to a woman, CXXVII.-CLII. as 'exercises of skill undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derifion 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;