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tries that is not permitted to marry; and hence an ecclesiastic, on the principle of extremes meeting, is understood to be the most married of all men. Almost all the love sonnets of Alfieri are addressed to the wife of the second English Pretender, on whose death - from drinking the poet is understood to have been married to her. The course of my subject has brought me to Sir Philip Sidney, the Stella of whose sonnets was Lady Rich, the wife of a husband who is said to have been as bad as the Pretender and soon after Sir Philip, we shall meet with Shakespeare, the mysterious heroine of whose sonnets was evidently a person by no means belonging to the household of the great poet. The history of marriage would make a strange history: beautiful and devoted in many instances; ugly and unfitting in others; mixed up in all-though not by the parties with causes feudal, fiscal, and ecclesiastical, some of which, originating in Roman Catholic times, lie at the root of all which injures the ordinance, and being taken away, would render it fitter to go to an altar than ever it has been yet.

I need not add, that in the present collection of sonnets there is not a single verse which is objectionable. In those from Shakespeare the love is of so true a nature, that as it is not known to whom all his love-sonnets were addressed, and more than one lady might have been concerned in them at different periods of his life, we may hope that the object of the best of them was no less estimable than adored.

Sir Philip Sidney, with an additional and almost Shakespearian flow of ideas, was a very Italianate person in his writings. He acquired from Italian books a portion of

their conceits as well as beauties; took from them the title, and something of the style, of his "Arcadia"; made it, like theirs, a mixture of prose and verse; and in the verse introduced so great a number of their forms of composition that it would have been strange had he never written sonnets after their fashion. The reader will find one or two of them in this collection, highly characteristic. One in particular sounds like the last note of courtly chivalry. It may not be thought unworthy of remark, that the first three introducers of the Sonnet in England, Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, and Sir Philip Sidney, were all knightly and accomplished men.

It is not a little curious, that in spite of this example on the part of his friend Sidney and others, and a great love for Italian poetry on his own, the first man that wholly and studiously set aside the Italian pattern of the Sonnet, should be Spenser. I say studiously set aside, because the form which he invented for it in its stead, appears to have been the result of repeated experiments.

The poetical student, I think, will not be uninterested by a sight of these experiments. The first, strangely enough, is in blank verse, — a speculation unique of its kind. The second is in three elegiac quatrains, like those of Gray's "Country Churchyard," ending with a couplet; which is the form that was adopted by Shakespeare. The third, which Spenser finally adopted, linked the three quatrains together by means of a rhyme out of each.

It is no little addition to the strangeness of the first of these experiments, that six out of fifteen sonnets which

the poet has thus given in blank verse compose a translation of one of the odes of Petrarca, the twelve-lined stanzas of which he has enlarged for the purpose. And he appears to have been so bent on making them strictly regular sonnets in other respects, that all of them but one exhibit, by means of stops, the most marked Italianesque division into quatrains and terzettes. The specimen, however, here laid before the reader is translated, not out of Petrarca, but from the fine old French poet, Bellay, or rather to pile curiosity on curiosity - from a Dutch version of the Frenchman.*

"I saw a fresh spring rise out of a rocke,
Clere as christall against the sunny beames,
The bottome yellow like the shining sand,
That golden Pactol drives upon the plaine :
It seemed that arte and nature strived to joyne
There in one place all pleasures of the eye.

There was to heare a noise alluring slepe

Of many accordes, more swete than Mermaid's songs.
The seates and benches shone as ivorie;

An hundred Nymphes sate side by side about,
When from nie hilles a naked rout of Faunes

With hideous cry assembled on the place;

Which with their feete uncleane the water fouled,

Threw down the seates, and drove the Nimphs to flight.

If the guess of Spenser's biographers be correct in dating his birth "probably about the year 1553," the poet must have been sixteen when he wrote these blankverse sonnets, for they were published in the year 1569, which was that of his entrance into the University.

* See Todd's edition of Spenser, vol. i. p. v., in Life, and vol. vii. p. 525. I have no hesitation in attributing these blank-verse sonnets to Spenser, not only for the reasons there given, but from the poet's whole character, both as a man and a gentleman.

Youths went much earlier to the University in those days than they do now. How Spenser came to be acquainted with the Dutch language does not appear; though there was much intercourse with the Low Countries in those days; and English words possess keys to Dutch. It was easy also to get somebody to help him to a prose version. Upon the whole, the sonnets are worthy of the boyhood of such a man. You may see his noble and sweet notes commencing in every one of them. Yet observe how rich the strain has become in his version of the same sonnet, published some twenty years afterwards. I seize the opportunity of adding it, because it furnishes a sample of the illegitimate species of sonnet above alluded to, which is called Elegiac, and which formed the second of the author's experiments in sonnetmaking :

"I saw a spring out of a rocke forth rayle,

*

As cleare as christall gainst the sunnie beames,
The bottome yeallow, like the golden grayle
That bright Pactolus washeth with his streames :
It seem'd that Art and Nature had assembled
All pleasure there for which man's hart could long;
And there a noyse, alluring sleepe, soft trembled,
Of manie accords, more sweete than Mermaid's song:
The seates and benches shone as yvorie,
And hundred Nymphs sate side by side about ;
When from nigh hills, with hideous outcrie,

A troupe of Satyres in the place did rout,

* Gravel.

ray,

t

Which with their villeine feete the streame did
Threw down the seats, and drove the Nymphs away. ‡

Whether this version of Bellay's Sonnet was from the Dutch or the French, it is very close to the French original.

In the form of his third and last experiment in sonnet-making, which, like the blank-verse specimen, was an entirely new one, Spenser wrote all the sonnets which he finally published when he was forty years of age, under the title of Amoretti, - Little Loves. The title is good; but compared with what was to be expected of them, these Little Loves not to speak it irreverently-are rather a set of dull, middle-aged gentlemen, images of the author's time of life, and of the commonplace sufferings which he appears to have undergone from a young and imperious mistress. Spenser gave the world to understand, though in words the reverse of disparaging to the lady, that he married, as the phrase is, "beneath him." If the heroine of the sonnets was this lady, as she is believed to have been, it is not improbable that she was at once rendered proud by the homage, and secretly mortified and irritated at not knowing how to receive it; that is to say, how to respond to its refinements. When her admirer's love is at its happiest, it is only by comparison with something the reverse. The following sonnet is one of the best. It partakes of his sweet modulation; and one of the lines, "Through the broad world," has the strength of his full hand upon it. The reader will bear in mind, with regard to this form of sonnet, what has been said of its substitution of a third quatrain and a couplet for the two terzettes, and its linking all the quatrains together with a rhyme out of each.

Mark when she smiles with amiable cheare,
And tell me whereto can ye lyken it,
When on each eyelid sweetly doe appeare
An hundred graces as in shade to sit.
Lykest it seemeth, in my simple wit,

Unto the fayre sunshine in somer's day,