of love (CIX.), he will never wander again (cx.); and his past faults were partly caused by his temptations as a player (CXI.); he cares for no blame and no praife now except those of his friend (cxII.). Once more he is abfent from his friend (Fourth Abfence?), but full of loving thought of him (CXIII. CXIV.). Love has grown and will grow yet more (cxv.). Love is unconquerable by Time (cxvI.). Shakfpere confeffes again his wanderings from his friend; they were tefts of Will's conftancy (cxvII.); and they quickened his own appetite for genuine love (CXVIII.). Ruined love rebuilt is ftronger than at first (CXIX.); there were wrongs on both fides and must now be mutual forgiveness (cxx.). Shakspere is not to be judged by the report of malicious cenfors (CXXI.); he has given away his friend's prefent of a table-book, because he needed no remembrancer (cxxII.); records and registers of time are false; only a lover's memory is to be wholly trufted, recognifing old things in what seem new (CXXIII.); Shakspere's love is not based on felf-intereft, and therefore is

uninfluenced by fortune (CXXIV.); nor is it founded on external beauty of form or face, but is fimple love for love's fake (cxxv.). Will is ftill young and fair, yet he should remember that the end must come at last (CXXVI.).

Thus the series of poems addreffed to his friend clofes gravely with thoughts of love and death. The Sonnets may be divided at pleasure into many smaller groups, but I find it possible to go on without interruption from I. to XXXII.; from XXXIII. to XLII.; from XLIII. to LXXIV.; from LXXV. to xcvi.; from XCVII. to XCIX.; from c. to cxxvI.1

1

I do not here attempt to trace a continuous fequence in the Sonnets addreffed to the darkhaired woman CXXVII.-CLIV.; I doubt whether fuch continuous fequence is to be found in them; but in the Notes fome points of connexion between fornet and fonnet are pointed

out.

1 Perhaps there is a break at LVIII. The most careful Rudies of the sequence of the Sonnets are Mr. Furnivall's in his preface to the Leopold Shakspere, and Mr. Spalding's in The Gentleman's Magazine, March 1878.

If Shakspere unlocked his heart' in these Sonnets, what do we learn from them of that great heart? I cannot answer otherwise than in words of my own formerly written. 'In the Sonnets we recognise three things: that Shakfpere was capable of measureless personal devotion; that he was tenderly sensitive, sensitive above all to every diminution or alteration of that love his heart fo eagerly craved; and that, when wronged, although he suffered anguish, he tranfcended his private injury, and learned to forgive. . . . The errors of his heart originated in his fenfitivenefs, in his imagination (not at first inured to the hardness of fidelity to the fact), in his quick consciousness of existence, and in the felf-abandoning devotion of his heart. There are fome noble lines by Chapman in which he pictures to himself the life of great energy, enthusiasms and paffions, which for ever ftands upon the edge of utmost danger, and yet for ever remains in abfolute fecurity :

Give me a Spirit that on this life's rough sea Loves to have his fails fill'd with a lufty wind

Even till his fail-yards tremble, his mafts crack,
And his rapt fhip runs on her fide fo low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air;
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is,—there's not any
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.

law

Such a mafter-spirit, preffing forward under ftrained canvas was Shakspere. If the ship dipped and drank water, she rose again; and at length we behold her within view of her haven failing under a large, calm wind, not without tokens of stress of weather, but if battered, yet unbroken by the waves'. The laft plays of Shakfpere, The Tempeft, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Henry VIII., illuminate the Sonnets and juftify the moral genius of their writer.

I thank Profeffor Atkinson for help given in reading the proof-fheets of my Introduction; Mr. W. J. Craig, for illustrations of obfolete words; Mr. Furnivall, for hints given from time to time in our difcuffion by letter of the grouping of the Sonnets. Mr. Edmund Goffe and

Dr. Grofart, for the loan of valuable books; Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, for a note on the date of Lintott's reprint; Mr. Hart, for several ingenious fuggeftions; Dr. Ingleby, for fome guidance in the matter of Shakspere portraiture; and Mr. L. C. Purfer, for translations of the Greek epigrams connected with Sonnets CLIII., CLIV.