Manningham's diary among the Ashmolean MSS., under the date, March 13th, 1601. It is, that a woman, "a citizen," seeing Richard Burbadge, the great actor of the day, play Richard III., was so carried away by her admiration that she asked him to visit her after the play, — an invitation to supper from ladies to favorite actors being then not uncommon. Shakespeare overheard the appointment, (the custom of admitting spectators upon the stage during the performance must again be remembered,) and, resolving to supplant his friend, went to the rendezvous before him, announced himself as the crook-backed tyrant, and was as successful as his own hero in winning female favor under adverse circumstances. Burbadge arrived soon after, and, sending word that Richard III. was at the door, received for answer, from a source as to which he could have had no doubt, that "William the Conqueror was before Richard III."

But it was not by adventures of this kind that a soul like Shakespeare's could be satisfied; nor was it under the influence of women of this sort that with the advance of years a striking change took place in the traits of his female characters. For it is remarkable that in his earliest plays, those written when his Stratford reminiscences were freshest, the women are the reverse of lovable and gentle. But after a few years of London life had widened his observation and mitigated his

experience, there came such a change over his creatures of this kind, that it is praise enough of any, the fairest now and sweetest, to say she is like one of Shakespeare's women. Surely not to chance, and as surely to no evolution from the depths of moral consciousness, is due the difference between the women in Henry the Sixth, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Love's Labor's Lost, and those in the later plays. Nor could it have been merely the fruit of maturing judgment. For very young men, and, most of all, very young poets, are sure to see women with the mind's eye only through the soft lustre of those charms which bewilder even the better instructed, though perhaps not wiser, apprehension of prosaic age.* Shakespeare's mind, like Raphael's, furnished forth his own ideals; but there can be no reasonable doubt that it was in the high-bred, cultivated women into whose society his noble and worshipful admirers took him that he found his female models. From among these women did

* I have always thought Kent's reply to Lear's inquiry as to his age a superlative touch of penetration.

"Kent. Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing; nor so old, to dote on her for anything: I have years on my back forty-eight."

† During the slow progress of these Memoirs from manuscript into type Miss Bunnett's translation of Dr. Gervinus's voluminous Shakespeare Commentaries has reached me. In his comments upon Much Ado About Nothing he says: "We have before drawn attention to the fact, that in the plays belonging to Shakespeare's

he go forth with heart unscathed? Among them all, was there not one who felt that, although she perhaps was of noble birth, that player, though not her lord, was master of her heart? Of the many courtly dames who then gave up all, even their good name, for men they loved, was there not one who knew the worth of Shakespeare? He with a painter's eye for beauty, and a poet's soul of passion, who could read women's hearts as in a mirror, alive to all the charms of cultivated society, and illustrating them in his person, and with a rustic wife eight years older than himself away off in Stratford, he with honey upon his tongue as well as in his pen, of such winning ways that men called him sweet, and gruff Ben Jonson's heart went out to him,-handsome and wellshaped too, is it in man's nature, is it in woman's nature, that he should not have loved and been beloved in London? Let only those who early period there is a remarkable preponderance of bad women: the poet's own experience appears at that time to have inspired him with no advantageous opinion of the female sex." Afterward Gervinus adds, speaking of the author's second period: 'Shakespeare must at that time in London, in the wider circle of his acquaintance, in his contact with the higher classes, have become intimate with women who withdrew him suddenly from his former i humor with the sex, into a devoted admiration of them." (Vol. I. p. 588.) While I cannot but be gratified at the support which my views thus receive from the learned German philosopher, it is only just that I should say that they are not appropriated from him without acknowledgment; they having been written out, and even partly put in type, long before his Shakespeare Commentaries made their appearance.

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have thoughtfully read his sonnets answer. whatever may have been the motives of those mysterious compositions, which alternately beguile us with their seeming revelations of a simple fact, and baffle us with the sudden presentation of impossibility, there beats beneath their artificial surface a pulse of passion so profound, there comes from behind their impenetrable veil a cry of anguish so personal as well as so human, that reason seeks in vain to stifle the intuitive conviction that in them we are face to face and eye to eye with the man Shakespeare, reading, though but vaguely comprehending, the inmost secrets of his heart. They may not be the record of his soul's experience, but they surely are its witness. They may possibly have been written for others, but they are of himself. They lack entirely the dramatic element, and tell an individual story; and no such living, fleshly birth as they ever took life from another's joy, or was brought forth by vicarious suffering.

To what period of Shakespeare's life we are to assign these sonnets cannot be decided. He had written some sonnets before 1598, because in that year Meres mentions certain "sugared sonnets among his private friends." But were they these? These tell of a dear, a trusted, and a faithless friend, of a mistress loved in spite of reason and in the teeth of conviction. Are these the sort of literary exercises that Shakespeare would be likely

to hand around among his curious, criticising friends? Or if they revealed the secrets of another's heart, would he be inclined to have them submitted to such publicity? The date of their publication makes it certain that these sonnets were all written before Shakespeare was forty-five years old; and they probably were produced between his thirtieth and his fortieth year. Thomas Thorpe's dedication tells us absolutely nothing of their origin; only that there was a secret about it that has never been revealed. Could either of those other persons whom they concern have become so reduced as to make merchandise of them, or have been so small-souled as to seek notoriety through their publication? Sadder, stranger things have happened. The mystery of these sonnets will never be unfolded; yet in an attempt to trace the course of Shakespeare's life they cannot be passed by, although they tell us nothing surely, except that they express the inmost thoughts and feelings of one who, however wise and prudent he might have been, was in his affections and his passions little more selfrestrained than David, little less wise than Sol

omon.