heart while they dispute whether of the twain is guilty of first admitting love. And all this ingenious nonsense is further exaggerated and dilated by every imaginable sort of conceit, quirk, and oddity. Of the genealogy of Pain, for example, we are informed that he is child. to Curse, foster-child to Human Weakness, brother to Woe, father to Complaint, and a guest of Constraint. One thing alone does the reader seldom or never meet with the thrill of a genuine feeling or the warm pervasive aura of a real personality. It would appear as though these poetasters had deliberately selected some lady of their acquaintance, the more distant the better, and had proceeded to make up on her their literary exercises in accordance with the invariable prescription. In fact Giles Fletcher, author of Licia, admits that for once there is no woman in the case at all-or rather that she is a mere Platonic phantom, a kind of allegorised idea. In one sense, indeed, the writers may be said to have had a kind of basis of fact. Undoubtedly they turned to account such general incidents of their daily experience as were suggestive and could be readily poetised to fit the form. But the basis is always trivial. The main thing was the elaboration of the conventional pattern with which it was to be overlaid. And with the exception of Shakespeare, whose actuality

is unmistakable, their final impression is of utter airiness and insubstantiality.

are

To this general run of mediocrity or worse, as we should now reckon it, there naturally some exceptions. Principal among such are are Sidney's "With how sad steps, O moon!" "Come, sleep, O sleep!" and “Leave me, O Love!"; Daniel's "Carecharmer sleep"; Spenser's "One day I wrote her name upon the sand"; and Drayton's exquisite "Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part," certainly the gem of the collection though it belongs in reality to a later period. Most of these are well known or are to be found in the "Golden Treasury." For this reason it will be better to quote a sonnet Barnes's which is less familiar but well worth reading as an illustration of their higher reaches.

Ah, sweet Content! where is thy mild abode?

Is it with shepherds and light-hearted Swains, Which sing upon the downs and pipe abroad, Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains? Ah, sweet Content! where dost thou safely rest? In heaven with angels? Which the praises sing Of him that made and rules at his behest,

The minds and hearts of every living thing.
Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbour hold?
Is it in churches with religious men,

Which please the gods with prayers manifold;
And in their studies meditate it then?

Whether dost thou in heaven or earth appear;

Be where thou wilt! Thou wilt not harbour here!
Barnes: Parthenophil and Parthenope, lxvi.

But such exceptions as this are very rare indeedand as for the rest they are essentially as has been described.

At first thought there is something very curious, almost disconcerting, about this sterility in an age that we have been accustomed to prefer before all others for its spontaneity, imagination, and fire. Half a dozen good sonnets -the list was nearly exhaustive-out of a thousand; and it is difficult to pick up a play of the time without finding more than one evidence of great, if irregular, power! What, then, is the explanation of this anomaly? As a matter of fact, no serious answer to this question has ever been attempted-possibly the question itself could not have been intelligently propounded-before Mr. Lee's introductory essay to these volumes. Of his solution-or rather of the solution which suffers itself to be drawn from his essay-the substance may be briefly explained as follows:

It is hardly necessary to repeat that the sonnet was introduced into England for the first time about the middle of the sixteenth century by Wyatt and Surrey, who had it themselves from Petrarch, the head and front of all sonneteering. But it was not exactly

in continuation of this original impulse that the great flood of Elizabethan sonnet literature began to rise in 1591. By that time the sonnet was the rage throughout Europe, not only in Italy, the land of its birth, but also in France, where it had been domesticated by the Pléiade, a group of writers devoted to the importation of Italian literature, among whom Ronsard is the most prominent. And it was from this secondary or derivative source, this cistern or reservoir, that the sonneteers of Elizabeth pumped their supplies. The best of them, such men as Sidney and Spenser, were, to be sure, acquainted with Italian literature at first hand. But even they were indebted in great measure to the French, whereas the feebler run of versifiers had frequently no other support except their English contemporaries. Nor was this debt in any case merely formal or confined to the vague sphere of poetic influence or inspiration. Not only is the whole conception of the genre borrowed, but its procédés and execution are appropriated as well. The same ideas and notions, the same conceits and figures, the same individual features, recur through the entire lineage, Italian, French, and English. Even the vacuous idealism is a remote echo of Petrarchian Platonism. In short, to cut down a long story, the English sonnet is not only a fad and liable to all the abuses of an artificial

fashion, it is also a rechauffé, a mere imitation of an imitation, even a line-for-line translation of foreign models, not particularly consonant, it may be added, with the English genius. Of this fact there can be no reasonable doubt after even a cursory examination of Mr. Lee's citations and references. And indeed, the product itself, as has been noticed, shows many of the earmarks of translation; it is stiff and splay, dull, diffuse, and mechanical.

As

And yet in pirating, the Elizabethans did modify the sonnet to some extent, slavish as from Mr. Lee's account they may appear. every one knows nowadays, the Petrarchian sonnet had a rhyming scheme in which not only were the first eight lines, constituting the octave, and the last six, the sestet, kept distinct, but also the two quatrains of the former and the two tercets of the latter—a scheme to which the phrasing itself was made to conform. This was the discipline generally followed in sixteenth-century Italy and was also adopted by the French with an unimportant variation of the sestet. In England, however, the inclination was to close with a couplet, whence it became natural for the English to consider the preceding twelve lines as made up of three sets of fours and to rhyme then alternately, often without any distinct or regular memberment, as in Shakespeare's case.