Yes, like enough, high-battled Cæsar will

Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show,
Against a sworder.

4. Conceit, conception, imagination.

11. Debateth with Decay, holds a discussion with Decay, or combats along with Decay. Debate is used frequently by Shakspere in each of these senses.

XVI. The gardening image "engraft," in XV. 14, suggests the thought of "maiden gardens" and “living flowers" of this sonnet.

7. Bear your living flowers; "bear you," Lintott, Gildon, Malone, and others; but "your living flowers' stands over against "your painted counterfeit."

8. Counterfeit, portrait. Timon of Athens, Act v. sc. 1, 11. 83, 84 (to the Painter), "Thou draw'st a counterfeit best in all Athens."

9. Lines of life, i.e., children. The unusual expression is selected because it suits the imagery of the sonnet, lines applying to (1) Lineage, (2) delineation with a pencil, a portrait, (3) lines of verse as in XVIII. 12. Lines of life are living lines, living poems and pictures, children.

10. This, Time's pencil. The Quarto reads "this (Times pensel or my pupill pen)." G. Massey conjectures "this time's pencil," adding:-"What Shakspeare says is, that the best painter, the master-pencil of the time, or his own pen of a learner, will alike fail to draw the Earl's lines of life as he himself can do it, by his own sweet skill. This pencil of the time may have been Mirevelt's; he

painted the Earl [of Southampton's] portrait in early manhood."-Shakspere's Sonnets and his Private Friends, pp. 115, 116 (note). Prof. Stengel proposes "With this, Time's pencil, for my pupil pen," etc. Are we to understand the line as meaning "Which this pencil of Time or this my pupil pen?" and is Time here conceived as a limner who has painted the youth so fair, but whose work cannot last for future generations? In XIX. "Devouring Time" is transformed into a scribe; may not "tyrant Time" be transformed here into a painter? In xx. it is Nature who paints the face of the beautiful youth. This masterpiece of twenty years can endure neither as painted by Time's pencil, nor as represented by Shakspere's unskilful, pupil pen. Is the "painted counterfeit" of 1. 8 Shakspere's portrayal in his verse? Compare LIII. 1. 5.

11. Fair, beauty.

XVII. In XVI. Shakspere has said that his "pupil pen cannot make his friend live to future ages. He now carries on this thought; his verse, although not showing half his friend's excellences, will not be believed in times to come.

12. Keats prefixed this line as motto to his Endymion ; "stretched metre means overstrained poetry.

13, 14. If a child were alive his beauty would verify the descriptions in Shakspere's verse, and so the friend would possess a twofold life, in his child and in his poet's rhyme.

XVIII. Shakspere takes heart, expects immortality for his verse, and so immortality for his friend as surviving

in it. He therefore gives expression fearlessly to the "poet's rage."

3. May, a summer month; we must remember that May in Shakspere's time ran on to within a few days of our mid June. Compare Cymbeline, Act 1. sc. 3, 1. 36 :—

And like the tyrannous breathing of the north
Shakes all our buds from growing.

5. Eye of heaven. So King Richard II., Act III. sc. 2, 1. 37, "the searching eye of heaven.”

10. That fair thou owest, that beauty thou possessest. 11, 12. This anticipation of immortality for their verse was a commonplace with the Sonnet-writers of the time of Elizabeth. See Spenser, Amoretti, Sonnets 27, 69, 75; Drayton, Idea, Sonnets 6, 44; Daniel, Delia, Sonnet 39.

XIX. Shakspere, confident of the immortality of his friend in verse, defies Time.

1. Devouring Time. So Love's Labour's Lost, Act I. sc. 1, 1. 4, "Cormorant devouring Time." S. Walker conjectures destroying.

5. Fleets. The Quarto has fleet'st. I follow Dyce, believing that Shakspere cared more for his rhyme than his grammar, at a time when grammatical freedom was great. Compare confounds, Sonnet VIII. 7.

XX. A flight of praise; his friend the ideal of human beauty," beauty's pattern" (XIX. 12), and as such owning the attributes of male and female beauty.

1. A woman's face, but not, as women's faces are,

painted by art.

2. Master-mistress of my passion, who with united charms of man and woman.

suggests to me that passion may be used of love-poem, frequent in Watson.

sways my love

Mr. H. C. Hart

in the old sense

5. Less false in rolling. Compare Spenser, Faerie Queene, Bk. III. c. i. s. 41 :

Her wanton eyes (ill signes of womanhed)

Did roll too lightly.

8. In the Quarto, "A man in hew all Hews in his controwling." The italics and capital letter suggested to Tyrwhitt that more is meant here than meets the eye, that the Sonnets may have been addressed to some one named Hews or Hughes, and that Mr. W. H. may be Mr. William Hughes. But the following words have also capital letters and are in italics :-Rose I. 2; Audit IV. 12; Statues LV. 5; Intrim LVI. 9; Alien LXXVIII. 3 ; Satire c. 11; Autumne CIV. 5; Abisme CXII. 9; Alcumie CXIV. 4; Syren CXIX. 1; Heriticke CXXIV. 9; Informer cxxv. 13; Audite cxxvi. 11; Quietus CXXVI. 12. The word "hue" was used by Elizabethan writers not only in the sense of complexion, but also in that of shape, form. The following are instances:

Her snowy substance melted as with heat,

Ne of that goodly hew remained ought,

But th' empty Girdle which about her waist was wrought. Faerie Queene, Bk. V. c. iii. s. 24.

In Faerie Queene, Bk. V. c. ix. ss. 17, 18, Talus tries

to seize Malengin, who transforms himself into a fox, a bush, a bird, a stone, and then a hedgehog :—

Then gan it [the hedgehog] run away incontinent,
Being returned to his former hew.

Nash's Pierce Pennilesse, pp. 82, 83 (Shakespeare Society's Reprint). "The spirits of the water have slow bodies, resembling birds and women, of which kinde the Naiades and Nereides are much celebrated amongst poets. Nevertheless, however they are restrayned to their severall similitudes, it is certain that all of them desire no forme or figure so much as the likenesse of a man, and doo thinke themselves in heaven when they are infeoft in that hue. The meaning of lines 7, 8 in this sonnet then may be, "A man in form and appearance, having the mastery over all forms in that of his, which steals," etc. If one were to amuse oneself with fancied discoveries, why not insist on the fact that this mysterious Hews contains the initials of both W. H. and W. S. With the phrase "controlling hues CVI. 8:

compare Sonnet

Even such a beauty as you master now.

11. Defeated, defrauded, disappointed. So A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act IV. sc. 1, 11. 153-155:

They would have stolen away; they would, Demetrius,
Thereby to have defeated you and me,

You of your wife and me of my consent.

XXI. The first line of xx. suggests this sonnet. The face of Shakspere's friend is painted by Nature alone, and