sible happiness he has elsewhere sought in vain. He looks for a love unchanging, inexhaustible, ideal. He passes from one extreme to another. He will love only a soul (xx.). His great desire is that the marriage of true minds may be eternal; he declares war with time; he would procure for his friend the twofold perpetuity of offspring and of verse. "Ah! c'est que pour Shakespeare la poésie a un caractère auguste et religieux: elle a, comme l'amour, cette faculté mystérieuse d'engendrer. La muse aussi est mère."

Mr. W. H., according to Hugo, is Southampton. Thorpe wishes W. H. "happiness" and "eternity," as Shakspere in the Dedication of Lucrece had wished Southampton "long life, still lengthened with happiness." Venus and Adonis is only the symbolic formula of the ideas developed in the sonnets urging marriage on his friend. In Sonnet LIII. he writes:

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit.
Is poorly imitated after you.

The date is between 1593-1598; the Sonnets were kept private, as Drake says, because Queen Elizabeth was opposed to Southampton's marriage. Thorpe calls Southampton "Mr. W. H.," because it would not be becoming to connect his name openly with the Sonnets. The rival poet is Marlowe.

The Sonnets are arranged by Hugo in the following order:-CXXXV., CXXXVI., CXLIII., CXLV., CXXVIII., Passionate Pilgrim No. 8, CXXXIX., CXL., CXXVII., CXXXI., CXXXII., CXXX., XXI., CXLIX., CXXXVII., CXXXVIII., CXLVII.,

CXLVIII., CXLI., CL., CXLII., CLII.-CLIV., CLI., CXXIX., CXXXIII., CXXXIV., CXLIV., XXXIII.-XXXV., XL.-XLII., XXVI., XXIII., XXV., XX., XXIV., XLVI., XLVII., XXVII., XXX., XXXI., CXXI., XXXVI., LXVI., XXXIX., L., LI., XLVIII., LII., LXXV., LVI., XXVII., XXVIII., LXI., XLIII., XLIV., XLV., XCVII.-XCIX., LIII., CIX.-CXX., LXXVII., CXXII.CXXV., XCIV.-XCVI., LXIX., LXVII., LXVIII., LXX., XLIX., LXXXVIII.-XCIII., LIII., CIX.-CXX., LXXVII., CXXII.-CXXV., XCIV.-XCVI., LXIX., LXVII., LXVIII., LXX., XLIX., LXXXVIII.— XCIII., LVII., LVIII., LXXVIII., LXXIX., XXXVIII., LXXX., LXXXII.-LXXXVII., XXXII., CXLVI., C.-CIII., CV., LXXVI., CVI., LIX., CXXVI., CIV., I.-XIX., LX., LXXIII., XXXVII., XXII., LXII., LXXI., LXXII., LXXIV., LXXXI., LXIV., LXIII., LXV., LIV., LV., CVIII., CVII.

SAMUEL NEIL.

[Shakespere, a Critical Biography. London, 1863, pp. 104-108. The Sonnets.]

66

Begetter" must mean "collector," for no single person can have been the sole cause of all the sonnets (“the onlie begetter"). May not Mr. W. H. be Mr. William Hathaway, born Nov. 30th, 1578, brother-in-law of William Shakspere. To give his brother-in-law a start, Shakspere may have given him the MS. of the Sonnets, telling him to get the most he could out of the booksellers for them.

"We do not believe in the continuity of the Sonnets; in the oneness of their object, i.e., inspirer; or in the entirely autobiographical theory. Many, we believe, were ad

dressed to Anne Hathaway, as bride and wife; several to his daughter [e.g., LXII.]; some to Queen Elizabeth [e.g., LXXXIII.-LXXXVI. and CVI.]; one at least to his son Hamnet [CVIII.]; a few to, or for, noble and beloved friends; and many, we think, are early exercises in the concetti then fashionable, or various forms of pleasing ideas. A few do possess a tone of soliloquy, that makes them seem quite autobiographical."

THOMAS KENNY.

[The Life and Genius of Shakespeare. 1864.]

The Sonnets were not only written by Shakespeare in his own character, but they were written by him directly with a view to his own gratification. They exhibit a weak and erring emotional and moral nature-an extravagant impressionability. . . . There is necessarily perhaps in creative imagination, as in all creative power, a feminine element. Mr. Kenny does not attempt to identify Shakspere's friend. For a reply to Mr. Kenny, see Karl Elze's William Shakespeare, pp. 494-505.

N. DELIUS.

[Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, I. 1865. Ueber Shakespeare's Sonette, pp. 18-56.]

The Sonnets are poems of the fancy, in which Shakspere treats non-dramatically some of the themes treated in the plays and in Venus and Adonis. "Begetter," in Thorpe's dedication, means procurer. An analysis of the Sonnets, showing their grouping, and the significance of

each

group,

concludes the article. It seems impossible to Delius that Sonnets I.-CXXVI. can apply to one and the

same person.

J. A. HERAUD.

[Shakspere, his Inner Life as intimated in his Works. pp. xiv. 521. 8vo. Appendix A (pp. 484-502). Shakspere's Sonnets. An Inductive Critique. Temple Bar, April, 1862.)]

London, 1865. A New View of Reprinted from

The Sonnets exhibit both objective and subjective elements; they are poems of Reformation England. Sonnets I.-XVII. are a Protestant declaration against celibacy, under the form of an address to an Ideal Man. The poet then treats of two attributes of Ideal Man (who is bi-sexual), Beauty and Love. This Ideal Man is Shakspere's ideal self; "Man becomes all but the theistic Logos." The dark woman is the Bride of the Canticles, "black but comely." The "better angel" of Sonnet CXLIV. is the Reformed Church; the "worser spirit," the Celibate Church (Catholicism). Love and its rights, the emancipation of the natural appetites within rational limits, is the argument of the Reformation, as projected by Luther, and the argument also of Shakspere's Sonnets.

F. T. PALGRAVE.

[Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare. Edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. London, 1865.]

Mr. Palgrave omits two sonnets, omits also the numbering of the Sonnets, and substitutes for numbers graceful titles of his own invention. A few remarks on the style and character of the poems, and a few notes, are added.

"These revelations of the poet's innermost nature appear to teach us less of the man than the tone of mind which we trace, or seem to trace, in Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and The Tempest; the strange imagery of passion. which passes over the magic mirror has no tangible existence before or behind it." No other known or plausible name but Herbert's has been suggested as the object of the Sonnets. The Sonnets present a certain sequence or story, and the external facts of the story are obvious enough: but these are of very minor importance. The difficulty remains. We can hardly understand, we cannot enter into the strange series of feelings which they paint; we cannot understand how our great and gentle Shakespeare could have submitted himself to such passions; we have hardly courage to think that he really endured them. Yet reality appears stamped on the Sonnets, not less forcibly than the mythical character upon the autobiography of Dante's early days. The "excessive affection" condemned by Hallam is characteristic of great genius. This, in the sublime language of the Phaedrus, is that "possession and ecstasy with which the Muses seize on a plastic and pure soul, awakening it and hurrying it forth like a Bacchanal in the ways of song." Friendship blazes into passion; the furnace of love is seven times heated. We cannot bring ourselves, with Hallam, to wish that Shakespeare had never written them; but there is pleasure also in the belief that this phase of feeling was transient, and that the sanity which, not less than ecstasy, is an especial attribute of the great poet, returned to Shakespeare.

G