asserts that they are "of the same purity the Authour then living avouched," and that the reader will find them "seren, clear, and elegantly plain." The titles given to the groups carry the suggestion that the Sonnets, with few exceptions, were addressed by a lover to his lady.

This edition of 1640 was reprinted several times in the eighteenth century; the text of the quarto 1609, by Lintott 1711, in Steevens's Twenty Plays, 1766, and by Malone. Gildon and Sewell, editors of the first half of the century, having the 1640 text before them, assumed that the Sonnets were addressed to Shakspere's mistress. It remained for the editors and critics of the second half of the century to discover that the greater number were written for a young man. To a careful reader of the original it needed small research to ascertain that a friend is addressed in the first hundred and twenty-five sonnets, to which the poem in twelve lines, numbered cxxvI., is an Envoy; while the Sonnets CXXVII.-CLIV. either address a mistress, or have reference to her and to the poet's passion for her.

The student of Shakspere is drawn to the Sonnets not alone by their ardour and depth of feeling, their fertility and condensation of thought, their exquisite felicities of phrase, and their frequent beauty of rhythmical movement, but in a peculiar degree by the possibility that here, if nowhere else, the greatest of English poets may -as Wordsworth puts it-have "unlocked his heart."1 1 Poets differ in the interpretation of the Sonnets as widely as critics. "With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart' once more!

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

It were strange if his silence, deep as that of the secrets of Nature, never once knew interruption. The moment, however, we regard the Sonnets as autobiographical, we find ourselves in the presence of doubts and difficulties, exaggerated, it is true, by many writers, yet certainly real.

If we must escape from them, the simplest mode is to assume that the Sonnets are "the free outcome of a poetic imagination" (Delius). It is an ingenious suggestion of Delius that certain groups may be offsets from other poetical works of Shakspere. Those urging a beautiful youth to perpetuate his beauty in offspring may be a derivative from Venus and Adonis; those declaring love for a dark-complexioned woman may rehandle the theme set forth in Berowne's passion for the dark Rosaline of Love's Labour's Lost; those which tell of a mistress resigned to a friend may be a nondramatic treatment of the theme of love and friendship So, Mr. Browning; to whom replies Mr. Swinburne, "No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning." Some of Shelley's feeling with reference to the Sonnets may be guessed from certain lines to be found among the Studies for Epipsychidion and Cancelled Passages (Poetical Works: ed. Forman, vol. ii. pp. 392, 393), to which my attention has been called by Mr. E. W. Gosse :

"If any should be curious to discover

Whether to you I am a friend or lover,

Let them read Shakspeare's sonnets, taking thence

A whetstone for their dull intelligence

That tears and will not cut, or let them guess

How Diotima, the wise prophetess,

Instructed the instructor, and why he
Rebuked the infant spirit of melody

On Agathon's sweet lips, which as he spoke
Was as the lovely star when morn has broke
The roof of darkness, in the golden dawn,
Half-hidden and yet beautiful."

presented in the later scenes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Perhaps a few sonnets, as CX., CXI., refer to circumstances of Shakspere's life (Dyce). The main body of these poems may still be regarded as mere exercises of the fancy.

Such an explanation of the Sonnets has the merit of simplicity; it unties no knots but cuts all at a blow. If the collection consists of disconnected exercises of the fancy, we need not try to reconcile discrepancies, nor shape a story, nor ascertain a chronology, nor identify persons. And what indeed was a sonneteer's passion but a painted fire? What was the form of verse but an exotic curiously trained and tended, in which an artificial sentiment imported from Italy gave perfume and colour to the flower?

And yet, in this as in other forms, the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality, was not commonly caught out of the air, but-however large the conventional element in it may have been-was born of the union of heart and imagination: in it real feelings and real experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were raised to an ideal expression. Spenser wooed and wedded the Elizabeth of his Amoretti. The Astrophel and Stella tells of a veritable tragedy, fatal perhaps to two bright lives and passionate hearts. And what poems of Drummond do we remember as we remember those which record how he loved and lamented Mary Cunningham?

Some students of the Sonnets, who refuse to trace their origin to real incidents of Shakspere's life, allow that they form a connected poem, or at most two connected poems;

and these, they assure us, are of deeper significance than any mere poetical exercises can be. They form a stupendous allegory; they express a profound philosophy. The young friend whom Shakspere addresses is in truth the poet's Ideal Self or Ideal Manhood, or the Spirit of Beauty, or the Reason, or the Divine Logos; his dark mistress, whom a prosaic German translator (Jordan) takes for a mulatto or quadroon, is indeed Dramatic Art, or the Catholic Church, or the Bride of the Canticles, black but comely. Let us not smile too soon at the pranks of Puck among the critics; it is more prudent to move apart and feel gently whether that sleek nole with fair large ears may not have been slipped upon our own shoulders.

When we question saner critics why Shakspere's Sonnets may not be at once Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, their answer amounts to this: Is it likely that Shakspere would so have rendered extravagant homage to a boy patron? Is it likely that one, who so deeply felt the moral order of the world, would have yielded, as the poems to his dark lady acknowledge, to a vulgar temptation of the senses? or, yielding, would have told his shame in verse? Objections are brought forward against identifying the youth of the Sonnets with Southampton or with Pembroke. It is pointed out that the writer speaks of himself as old, and that in a sonnet published in Shakspere's thirty-fifth year. Here evidently he cannot have spoken in his own person, and if not here, why elsewhere? Finally, it is asserted that the poems lack internal harmony: no real person can be what Shakspere's friend is described as being-true and false,

constant and fickle, virtuous and vicious, of hopeful expectation and publicly blamed for careless living.

Shakspere speaks of himself as old. True, but in the sonnet published in The Passionate Pilgrim (cxxxvIII.), he speaks as a lover, contrasting himself skilled in the lore of life with an inexperienced youth. Doubtless at thirty-five he was not a Florizel nor a Ferdinand. In the poems to his friend, Shakspere is addressing a young man perhaps of twenty years, in the fresh bloom of beauty; he celebrates with delight the floral grace of youth, to which the first touch of time will be a taint; those lines of thought and care, which his own mirror shows, bear witness to time's ravage. It is as a poet that Shakspere writes, and his statistics are those not of arithmetic but of poetry.

That he should have given admiration and love without measure to a youth high born, brilliant, accomplished, who singled out the player for peculiar favour, will seem wonderful only to those who keep a constant guard upon their affections, and to those who have no need to keep a guard at all. In the Renascence epoch, among natural products of a time when life ran swift and free, touching with its current high and difficult places, the ardent friendship of man with man was one. To elevate it above mere personal regard a kind of Neo-Platonism was at hand, which represented Beauty and Love incarnated in a human creature as earthly vicegerents of the Divinity. "It was then not uncommon," observes the sober Dyce, "for one man to write verses to another in a strain of such tender affection as fully warrants us in terming them amatory." Montaigne, not prone to take up extreme