In this fact we may find one more illustration of the inwardness of their personal intimacy. They were too intimate, and knew each other too well for any "bosh to be tolerated on either side. When Shakspeare spoke to his friend Southampton it was from the quiet depths of genuine feeling, not from the noisy shallows of flattery; and such was the nature of their intercourse, the freedom of their friendship, that he was permitted to do so, and could afford it. What Shakspeare found in Southampton was not great gifts of mind to admire, but a fine generosity and hearty frankness of nature to love. He was one of those who grasp a friend with both hands to hold him fast, and wear him in their heart of hearts. Shakspeare loved him too truly to speak of him falsely. He was the only great poet in an age of adulation who never stood cap in hand, or dealt in " lozengerie." Whilst Spenser's Sonnets are sent to his patron in the servile attitude of flunkies, Shakspeare's personal ones go with the bearing of ambassadors. Shakspeare did not address his friend as a public man at a distance had no need of the speaking trumpet-but was thus secret and familiar with him as a bosom friend.

Upon any theory of interpretation the personal intimacy must have been cf the closest, most familiar kind. Those who have so basely imagined that Shakspeare and his young friend both shared one mistress must assume that the intimacy was one of great nearness. Also those who accept the ignorant reading of the 20th Sonnet must admit that the Poet was on very familiar terms with the Earl to address him in the language which they have attributed to him by their modern rather than Elizabethan reading. My interpretation supposes a nearness equally great, a personal intimacy equally secret, but as pure as theirs is gross, as noble as theirs is ignoble, as natural as theirs is unnatural. An intimacy which does not strain all probability in assuming it to have been close enough for Shakspeare to write dramatic sonnets on his friend's love and courtship, as it does to suppose the Poet wrote Sonnets to proclaim their mutual disgrace, and perpetuate his own sin and shame. In truth it is the sense of such nearness as I advocate, that, working blindly, has given some show of likelihood to the vulgar interpretation; the tender feeling passing the love of woman which, carried into the interpretation of the impersonal Sonnets by prurient minds, has made the intimacy look one of which any extravagance might be believed.

The personal Sonnets all tend to show and illustrate this nearness of the two friends, only they prove it to have been on Shakspeare's part of the purest, loftiest, most manly kind. There is not one of those wherein Shakspeare is the speaker for certain, that can possibly be pressed into showing that the friendship had the vile aspect into which it has been distorted by false focussing.

Southampton being identified as the person addressed, and the object of Shakspeare's personal affection, the intimacy must have been one that was perfectly compatible with the Earl's love for a woman. For it is certain that he was in love, and passionately wooing Elizabeth Vernon, during some years of the time over which the Sonnets extend. And it would be witlessly weak to suppose that Shakspeare wrote Sonnets upon a disgraceful intimacy to amuse a man who was purely in love; out of all nature to imagine that he pursued Southampton in a wooing amorous way more fondly and tenderly than ever after the Earl had become passionately enamoured of Elizabeth Vernon. He would neither thrust himself forward as the lady's rival for the Earl's love, nor

appear in her presence-chamber covered with moral mire to remind them both of the fact that he and the Earl had rolled together in the dirt; and the intimacy must have been such as to recommend Shakspeare to Elizabeth Vernon as a friend of the Earl, not brand him as an enemy to herself. Again, Boaden is of opinion that the Sonnets do not at all apply to Lord Southampton, either as to age, character, or the bustle and activity of a life distinguished by distant and hazardous service, to something of which they must have alluded had he been their object. He argues that there was not sufficient difference in their ages for Shakspeare to have called the Earl "sweet boy." The difference was nine years and six months. Our Poet was born April, 1564, and his friend October, 1573. Now if the two men had been of like mental constitution, that difference in years would have made considerable disparity in character when the one was thirty and the other but twenty years of age. But one man is not as old as another at the same age, nor are men constituted alike. Shakspeare's mental life, and ten years' experience in such a life, were very different things from the life and experience of his young friend.

He would be quite warranted by this difference of age in calling the Earl "sweet boy," who was a boy when matched with his own mental manhood, but his expression did not depend on age alone. When a priest says "my child," he does not first stop to consider whether the person so addressed is some twenty years younger than himself. He is presumed to be speaking from a feeling that is not exactly governed or guided chronologically. So with Shakspeare. He is taking the liberty and latitude of affection. He uses the language of a love that delights to dally with the small words and dainty diminutives of speech, which Dante calls the "wee short words one cannot say without smiling," and tries as it were to express the largeness of its feeling in the least possible shape, on purpose to get all the nearer to nature; it being the way of all fond love to express itself in miniature. It is one of Shakspeare's ways of expressing the familiarity of his affection more than any difference in age. He speaks by virtue of that protecting tenderness of spirit which he feels for the youth-the prerogative of very near friendship-an authority which no age could necessarily confer. And it is also his way of expressing the difference of rank and position, as the world would have it, that existed betwixt them; the distance at which he is supposed to stand is turned to account in the shape of an elder brotherhood. It is of set purpose that Shakspeare paints himself older than he was, as most obviously he has done; it is intended as a foil and framework for his picture. He deepens the contrast and gives to his own years a sort of golden gloom, and mellow background, with the view of setting forth in more vernal hues the fresh ruddy youth of his friend, the subject of his "passion." He puts on an autumnal tint and exaggerates his riper years on purpose to place in relief that image of youth which he has determined to perpetuate in all its spring-tide beauty, and thus the "yellow leaf" throws out the ratheness of the green. does not show that there were not sufficient years betwixt them, but that the intimacy of friendship was such as to permit the Poet to obey a natural law which has served to finish his picture with a more artistic touch, and to further illustrate the familiarity of his affection.

This

And here we may fairly infer that the world is indebted to this personal relationship for those beautiful delineations of loving friendship betwixt man and man which Shakspeare has given us, excelling all other dramatists here as

elsewhere. He himself has portrayed the most human-hearted types of male friendship! He who wrote this memorable advice, "keep thy friend under thy own life's key; be checked for silence, but never taxed for speech!" There is a sacred sweetness in his manly friendship; fine and fragrant in its kind, as is the delicate aroma breathed by his most natural and exquisite women. No one, like him, has so tenderly shown the souls of two men in the pleasant wedlock of a delightful friendship. The rarest touch being reserved for the picture in which one friend is considerably older than the other. Then the effect is gravely-gladsome indeed; the touch is one of the nearest to nature. This we connect with his own affectionate feeling for the young Earl, and see how that which was subjective in the Sonnets has become objective in the plays. Thus, behind Bassanio and Antonio we may identify Southampton and Shakspeare.

Also, as pointed out to me many years ago by Mrs. Cowden Clarke, in another Antonio and the Viola-faced youth, Sebastian, of Twelfth Night, we have a still more striking reflex of the Sonnet friendship. This dear old fellow-labourer says in her letter, "I have often felt with you that Antonio and Bassanio were dramatized pictures of Shakspeare and his beloved friend of the Sonnets. I also think that Antonio, the sea-captain, and Sebastian are repainted pictures of the same subject, even yet more closely copied from life. The humility, the fascinated attachment, the idolatrous admiration, together with the consciousness of power to protect and guide, as shown in his restless following and offer of his sailor's purse, even while treating the youth as a being of a superior order, are all reflexes of the Sonnet friendship. And then the passionate regret in the after-scene - But oh! how vile an ilol proves this God!'"

This view, however, is coloured or discoloured by the personal theory of the Sonnets; and it should be remembered that Antonio's exclamation was the result of a complete mistake on his part, and was not based on any real change in Sebastian! He did not speak from a clearer insight into the character of his young friend, but from the blindness of his own error, and therefore this does NOT countenance the personal interpretation of certain Sonnets, which I maintain are not spoken by Shakspeare in his own character. The false impression in the play does not make for reality as between the two male friends in the Sonnets. Also, it is Sebastian who says, "My stars shine darkly over me; the malignance of MY fate might perhaps distemper yours."

Antonio says he gave Sebastian his love "without restraint, all his in Dedication." But note the difference between the Sonnet and the Play. Antonio declares that he did devotion to the image of Sebastian; whereas Shakspeare says in the Sonnets,

"Let NOT my love be called Idolatry,

Nor my beloved AS AN IDOL show.'

We have to distinguish difference as well as discover similitude in character, and must not allow any trait of likeness to vouch for a whit more than it is worth; must not permit the least smudge of confusion, nor lose the lcast particular by any looseness of generalization. We know that Shakspeare was "all his in Dedication," but we may never know how much the Poet adventured for his young friend who was bound up in the Essex bond, how far he lent himself, in spite of his better judgment, but we may be sure that his love, like

that of Antonio, was strong enough to surmount all selfish considerations. He was one like Antonio, “that for his love dares yet do more than you have heard bim brag to you he will."

Students of Shakspeare's times, his life, and works will have received an impression that our Poet must have been in some way, to some extent, mixed up with the affairs of Essex. I am told that the late Mr. Croker, of the Quarterly Review, always entertained this opinion, although he could never lay his hand on any very tangible evidence of the fact. There is constructive evidence enough to show, that if Shakspeare was not hand-in-glove with the Essex faction, he fought on their side pen-in-hand. In the chorus at the end of Henry the Fifth he introduced a prophecy of the Earl's expected successes in Ireland. This was after Bacon had parted company with Essex.

Then, one of the counts in Essex's indictment was the play of King Richard the Second, which, according to Bacon's account of Meyrick's arraignment, was ordered to be played to satisfy his eyes with a sight of that tragedy which he thought soon after his lord should bring from the stage to the State. That this play was Shakspeare's cannot be doubted, except by the most wilful crassness or determined blindness; nor that the "new additions of the Parliament scene, and the deposing of King Richard, as it hath been lately acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe," were made to the drama, previously written by Shakspeare, at the call of his patrons, the confused recollections of Forman notwithstanding. I shall have to add another bit of evidence, that Shakspeare did throw a little light on things political with the dark lanthorn, and introduce allusions which, to say the least, were calculated to make play for Essex; and thus far we must hold that our Poet was on the same side, and rowed, as we say, in the same boat with these "private friends"; this fact will furnish my concluding illustration of the personal intimacy of Peer and Poet, and of their friendship's binding and abiding force.

Nevertheless, the present contention is not that the Earl of Southampton was the friend of Shakspeare and that William Herbert was NOT! Both of these noblemen were patrons of literature; both were his personal friends; Southampton being the first by many years. It is the fundamental fallacy of the Brownites, who are misled by Thorpe's "Only Begetter," to assume that this proved or implied that one friend only was concerned in the production of the Sonnets; and it is their irretrievable error to try and read the one friendship backwards all through the Sonnets, when there are two entirely distinct series; so distinct that the earlier Sonnets, which were consecrated to Southampton by the personal love of Shakspeare, are profaned by being mixed up with the Latter Sonnets as commonly interpreted; the matter being made still worse when these are read as the personal utterances of Shakspeare. Then a defamation of his character is added to the de-consecration of the Sonnets which he had devoted to his first and foremost friend. It is their especial work to confuse by mixing up all together the Sonnets of Herbert with those of Southampton; the "Sweet Argument" with the unsweet, in the same state of general promiscuity as that which they then deduce and ascribe to Shakspeare, his Boy, and the Dark Lady. Hence they could neither distinguish nor define; they have only obfuscated the Sonnets and confused the minds of their readers.

Those who begin with Herbert and the date of 1598, under the blind guidance of Thorpe, are bound to read the Sonnets backwards. They are precluded from

F

looking at anything in a straightforward manner, and must go wrong from the starting-point.

The advocates of the hypothesis that William Herbert was the sole inspirer of Shakspeare's Sonnets are helplessly driven to deny (1) that the young friend was fatherless; (2) that he was the only support of his house; (3) that the Sonnets were begun in 1590; (4) that they were written before the early Plays as quoted; (5) that they were written before Venus and Adonis was printed; (6) that they were written with the poet's "Pupil Pen"; (7) that "Books" of the Sonnets were sent to Southampton privately before the Poems were dedicated to him publicly; (8) that Southampton was the living original from whom the Poet drew his Adonis; (9) that Marlowe was the rival Poet of the Sonnets; (10) that these Sonnets were extant in 1598 according to the testimony of Meres. In short, they are forced to ignore everything inside or outside of the Sonnets that can be established on behalf of Southampton; and compelled to suppress, pervert, or overlook every fact that is fatal to their one primary false assumption. It has been very truly said that when the human will is strongly disposed to ignore the practical consequences of a fact, it "has a subtle and almost unlimited power of blinding the intellect even to the most elementary laws of evidence;" but this truth has never been more curiously exemplified than by the Brownites.

The latest attempt to dodge the fatal dates is that made by Professor Dowden and Mr. Furnivall, who tell their readers that it really matters very little WHO the "Mr. W. H." of Thorpe's Inscription or the "Will" of the Sonnets was! But in doing this they are sitting like the man on the end of the plank projecting from a high window, and sawing betwixt themselves and the wall. If W. H. be not "William Herbert," they are launched backward into space nothing whatever to break their fall. A story told of the hunted beaver, by Herodotus, if not matter-of-fact, may be commended to their notice as a most apposite fable.

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