taking lines and phrases separately, that there was a good deal in common between Shakespeare and those whom Mr. Lee well calls the "modish sonneteers" of the day; that, like them, he often expressed himself in the conventional manner proper to the history of the sonnet; and that he pushed to an extreme its subtle conceits, and exaggerated its figurative language, till it became obscure, and often unintelligible. But it seems to me strange that any one, with a sense of poetry, after comparing Shakespeare's Sonnets, I will not say with those of poetasters like Watson and Barnes, or (to take a somewhat higher flight) with those of Giles Fletcher and Constable, but even with the work of men of fine taste and judgment, such as Daniel and Drayton, should conIclude that the cold, conventional, mechanical compositions of these poets proceeded from the same source of inspiration as sonnets like those beginning "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," or "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame," or "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth." In poems such as these most lovers of poetry will feel with Wordsworth that Shakespeare “unlocked his heart." They will decide with Hallam: “They express not only real but intense emotions of the heart"; so real, so intense, indeed, that some may even share Hallam's wish that they had never been written. Shakespeare seems in them to say with Hamlet: Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. On this point I shall say more presently. Meantime, to proceed with Mr. Lee, it seems to me that his logic has not only made him insensible to the depth of the personal feeling in Shakespeare's Sonnets, but has left us without any key to the meaning of the very particular allusions made in so many of them. Poetry does not create in vacuo; it is set in motion by real and external objects. It is not to be supposed that Dante and Petrarch could have written as they did if they had not been inspired by a genuine personal affection of some kind. Even Astrophel and Stella was grounded on a combination of real circumstances; and the Sonnets of Shakespeare flow from a far deeper source of imagination and emotion than those of Sidney. The person to whom they are addressed must have been a living person, and must have been capable of understanding, without explanation from the author, the poet's allusions, many of which seem perfectly pointless if they be regarded as mere fictions. Who can doubt that, when Shakespeare composed Sonnet cxxviii., he had experienced the feelings he describes in listening to a real woman playing on the virginals? What possible point can there have been in inventing "for the amusement of friends" such a situation as that recorded in Sonnets xxxiv., xxxv., xl.-xlii. ? Is it to be supposed that the friend of the poet did not know what was meant by the allusion to the particular "spirit taught by spirits to write"? Or that there was no significant meaning in the lapse of time described in Sonnet civ. ?— To me, fair friend, you never can be old, Is this the language of a protégé to a patron? My belief is that, in his Sonnets, Shakespeare was not, like so many of his contemporaries, elaborating a cold system of poetical flattery, but was giving expression to a profound view of life, the result partly of observation and reflection about men and things, partly of personal ex perience and emotion; that this view took fresh form and colour at different stages of his career; that its lyrical character may be detected running, as a thread, not only through the Sonnets themselves, but through his epic and dramatic work; whereby, when these different classes of composition are compared with each other, a certain insight may be obtained into his poetical motives. At the same time the expression of these general and personal feelings is greatly modified by the traditions of the poetical form which Shakespeare employed, so that, in interpreting his sentiment, we have always to keep in mind the vein of thought peculiar to the sonnet from the earliest ages, and the changes effected in its character by the altering moods of society at large. The sonnet had come down to Shakespeare, with but little alteration in its essential features, from the remote days of Guido Cavalcanti. The far-off cradle of its spirit is the Phædrus of Plato, in which the physical Eros is represented as the starting-point of the metaphysical, or intellectual, love which reveals to the mind the highest idea of beauty. By channels equally intricate and obscure this stream of sentiment reached the age of the troubadours, mingling itself on the way with two tributaries, the Teutonic inclination to woman-worship, intensified by the adoration of the Virgin Mary, and the allegorical system of Scripture interpretation, employed by the Catholic Church. In this way Plato's general conception of physical, as the stepping-stone to metaphysical, love, was personified in some particular woman, Beatrice or another, who again became the symbol of a higher spiritual idea, such as we find in Dante's description of the Blessed Company of Saints, seen in the heaven of the first movement. The Christianised idea of Plato is embodied in the words of Beatrice, addressed to Dante respecting the spiritual inferences to be drawn from material images: "Thus it is that it is necessary to speak to your wit, because it is only from an object of sense that it apprehends what it afterwards makes worthy of the understanding." So long as the mediæval genius prevailed in literature, this apotheosis of a particular woman, associated with universal ideas of spiritual love, was an essential feature of the sonnet, though with a constant tendency to become mechanical and conventional. But with the growth of the Renaissance a new vein of sentiment made its appearance. The revival of classical learning carried back men's imagination to the fountain-head of allegorical poetry, and made them reflect, not only on what Plato had said about the connection between physical and intellectual love, but also on the enthusiastic nature of the friendship between man and man, which, among the nobler of the Greeks, was dignified with the name of love. When Shakespeare wroteLet me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments— he was speaking the language both of Plato and of many of the greatest of the Humanists in all countries of Europe. Moved by a kindred impulse Montaigne poured forth his feelings of enthusiastic friendship for Estienne de la Boetie, and Languet his affection for Philip Sidney in the letter which he wrote to thank him for his portrait.' Sir Thomas Browne, a late disciple of the same school, says : I never yet cast a true affection on a woman, but I have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my God. . . . There are three most mystical unions-two natures in one person, three persons in one nature, one soul in two bodies. For though, indeed, they be really divided, yet are they so united as they seem but one, and make rather a duality than two distinct souls.2 As the succession of sonnets in the Vita Nuova was, according to Dante's own account, determined by a series of real incidents, so the Sonnets of Shakespeare appear to reflect ideally a certain real and external situation, the key to which is found in Sonnet cxliv., one of those which were published by Jaggard in 1599: Two loves I have of comfort and despair, The better angel is a man right fair, To win me soon to hell, my female evil Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt, Here, under the image of the Bonus Angelus and Malus Angelus of the Old Moralities, we have a very distinct suggestion of a real drama. The sketch of the situation corresponds with the twofold division of the Sonnets (Nos. i.-cxxvii. being addressed to a man, and the rest to a woman), and also with the state of things suggested, on the one hand, in Sonnets xl.-xlii. and, on the other, in Sonnets cxxxiii. - cxxxiv. At the same time, the two opposing angels appeal to opposite sides of the poet's own nature, and throughout the series the finest Sonnets are those in which Shakespeare links his addresses to the several objects of his love with ideas and feelings about the world in general. Whatever part he may himself have played in the drama, certain it is that the imaginary situation has a universal meaning, and moreover, the particular class of feeling, which he expresses in the Sonnets with such lyric intensity, is reproduced in his other poems both in an epic and a dramatic form. Accordingly, when we find in his tragedies or comedies ideal characters giving utterance to sentiments like those in the Sonnets, it is not unreasonable to conclude that we are in close contact with the nature of Shakespeare himself. As regards the relation in which the poet stands to the person whom he esteems his Good Angel, it is plain that this friend occupies in many of the Sonnets the same kind of position which Dante, in the Vita Nuova and in the Divine Comedy, assigns to Beatrice. The situation described seems to be an ardent, but at the same time an unequal, friendship between a youth of high birth, beauty, and accomplishment, and a man comparatively mature in |