Shakspere recommends his friend to occupy with his mind's imprint

FOURTH POEM.-Stanzas LXXVIII.-CI. To his friend, complaining that he prefers another poet's praises, and reproving him for faults that may injure his character. Who this rival poet was is beyond my conjecture; nor does it matter. To point out how different Shakspere himself is from a servile poet, he now blames the youth. for his faults-licentious conversation and fickleness in friendship-excusing himself for interference by alleging that a stain on the youth's character affects his friend. The Envoy (CI.), like that of the second poem, contains a promise of immortal fame in an address to his muse.

FIFTH POEM.-Stanzas CII.-CXXVI. To his friend, excusing himself for having been some time silent, and disclaiming the charge of inconstancy. Three years had elapsed between the first poem and the fifth. In the first three poems we find tenderness and integrity expressed, for the most part, in monotonous lines; the sentiment often disguised in conceits. The fourth is far less objectionable; but the fifth is full of varied, rich, and energetic poetry. In Stanza CXXI., "to be vile" means to be fickle in friendship, and yield to " affections new." The Envoy seems to take a poetical leave of the youth, and, to mark this, it is written not in sonnetstanza but six couplets.

SIXTH POEM.-Stanzas CXXVII.-CLII. To his mistress, on her infidelity. The stanzas up to CXXVI. are in due order; the same attention was not paid to this sixth poem. Some irrelevant stanzas (e.g., the Will ones, CXXXV., CXXXVI.) have been introduced. Shakspere here contends.

V

with an unworthy passion, and conquers it, leaving his mistress (CLII.) with bitter words. The punning sonnets are too playful; CXLV. is octosyllabic; CXLVI. solemn, but not congruous with the rest. These must be expunged. They occur between two parts of the poem; the first part being written in doubt and jealousy, and the after part in certainty of the woman's infidelity. The feeling of the poem lacks continuity, being a stormy feeling buffeted to and fro; the poem presents an admirable picture of pain and distraction caused by an almost overwhelming passion for a worthless object. This poem was written just before the second one to his friend, or soon after, in dramatic retrospection. Mr. Brown gives a brief prose paraphrase of each of the Sonnets.

HALLAM.

[Introduction to the Literature of Europe. Part III. ch. v.]

No one, as far as I remember, has ever doubted their genuineness; no one can doubt that they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart; but when they were written, who was the W. H. quaintly called their begetter-by which we can only understand the cause of their being written-and to what persons or circumstances they allude, has of late years been the subject of much curiosity. These Sonnets were long overlooked; Steevens spoke of them with the utmost scorn, as productions which no one could read; but a very different suffrage is generally given by the lovers of poetry, and perhaps there is now a tendency, especially

among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions. They rise indeed, in estimation, as we attentively read and reflect upon them; for I do not think that at first they give us much pleasure. No one ever entered more fully than Shakspeare into the character of this species of poetry, which admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line. But though each sonnet has generally its proper unity, the sense, I do not mean the grammatical construction, will sometimes be found to spread from one to another, independently of that repetition of the leading idea, like variations of an air, which a series of them frequently exhibits, and on account of which they have latterly been reckoned by some rather an integral poem than a collection of sonnets. But this is not uncommon among the Italians, and belongs, in fact, to those of Petrarch himself. They may easily be resolved into several series according to their subjects; but when read attentively, we find them relate to one definite, though obscure, period of the poet's life, in which an attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic character, and so extravagant in the phrases which the author uses, as to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work. It is true that in the poetry as well as in the fictions of early ages we find a more ardent tone of affection in the language of friendship than has since been usual; and yet no instance has been adduced of such rapturous devotedness, such an idolatry of admiring love, as one of the greatest beings

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whom Nature ever produced in the human form pours forth to some unknown youth in the majority of these Sonnets.

The notion that a woman was their general object is totally untenable, and it is strange that Coleridge should have entertained it. Those that were evidently addressed to a woman, the person above hinted, are by much the smaller part of the whole, but twenty-eight out of one hundred and fifty-four. And this mysterious Mr. W. H. must be presumed to be the idolised friend of Shakspeare. But who could he be? No one recorded as such in literary history or anecdote answers the description. But if we seize a clue which innumerable passages give us, and suppose that they allude to a youth of high rank as well as personal beauty and accomplishment, in whose favour and intimacy, according to the base prejudices of the world, a player and a poet, though he were the author of Macbeth, might be thought honoured, something of the strangeness, as it appears to us, of Shakspeare's humiliation in addressing him as a being before whose feet he crouched, whose frown he feared, whose injuriesand those of the most insulting kind, the seduction of the mistress to whom we have alluded-he felt and bewailed without resenting; something, I say, of the strangeness of this humiliation, and at best it is but little, may be lightened, and in a certain sense rendered intelligible. And it has been ingeniously conjectured within a few years by inquirers independent of each other that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, born in 1580, and afterwards a man of noble and gallant character, though always of a licentious life, was shadowed under the initials

F

of Mr. W. H. This hypothesis is not strictly proved, but sufficiently so, in my opinion, to demand our assent.1

Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these Sonnets, the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host of other passages attest the contrary.

CHARLES KNIGHT.

[The Pictorial Edition of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight. Illustrations of the Sonnets in vol. ii. of Tragedies, pp. 453-488 (2nd edition revised).]

Mr. W. H. was the obtainer ("begetter") of the sonnets for Thorpe; the publication was not sanctioned by Shakspere, and the arrangement of Sonnets in the Quarto, 1609, is arbitrary.

A number of separate poems can be distinguished. Some, as that urging a friend to marry, and that com

1 Pembroke succeeded to his father in 1601. I incline to think that the Sonnets were written about that time, some probably earlier, some later.