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Penelope Rich. In the other novel readings, such as Elizabeth Vernon's Jealousy, I have been able to do justice to Shakspeare and free his character from some very vile imputations without doing injustice to anyone else. The latter sonnets will not permit such a pleasant solution of their poetic problem. But, in seeking to take the weight off the broad shoulders of our great Poet, one does not want it to fall with unnecessary force on the woman who already had more than enough to bear.

Sidney has painted the Lady Rich as an Angel of Light. My reading, and the exigencies of William Herbert's case, make Shakspeare represent her as an Angel of Darkness. But the living woman in whom these two alternated, and out of which her nature was compounded-the woman who, with her tropical temperament and bleak lot in marriage, could yet remain the conqueror of Sidney and herself in such circumstances of peril as he has depicted in his confessions-the woman who would fight for her husband through thick and thin, and hurry back to him if she heard he was ill, wait upon him and watch over him day and night from a sense of duty rather than a necessity of affection-the woman who was passionately fond of her children, and so devoted to her brother Robert that she would have bartered body and soul for him, and gone through hell-fire for his sake-who was always ready to help a friend when her influence was of value at Court this woman has never been pourtrayed for us, unless some approach to her picture under other names has been made by the one great master, solely capable, in his dramatic works.

It is difficult, as Fuller has said, to draw those to the life who never sit still. The Lady Rich is one of these subjects, all sparkle and splendour, and the radiance as of rain which continual motion keeps a-twinkle, so various in their humours and sudden in their change. In her the most perplexing opposites intermixed with a subtle play

sea.

A MINGLED YARN OF GOOD AND EVIL..

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and endless shiftings of light and shade, many-coloured and evanescent as the breeze-tinted ripples of a summer No two portraits of her could possibly be alike. In some respects she was one of those generous sinners that Christ himself was very kind to, with a heart that was bountiful or pitiful and always ready to do a kindly action for those who were distressed. For exampleIn March 1596, she writes to Essex :-Worthy Brother, I was so loth to importune you for this poor gentlewoman, as I took this petition from her the last time I was at the Court, and yesterday I sent her word by her man that I would not trouble you with it, but wished her to make some other friends. Upon which message, her husband, that hath been subject to franticness through his troubles, grew in such despair as his wife's infinite sorrow makes me satisfy her again, who thinks that none will pity her misery and her children if you do not; since, if he cannot have pardon, he must fly, and leave them in very poor Dear brother, let me know your pleasure; and believe that I endlessly remain your most faithful sister, Penelope Rich.' And Rowland White gives us a pleasant glimpse of her ladyship in this aspect

estate.

In March 1597, he had occasion to seck her aid for the purpose of getting presented to the Queen a very earnest petition of Sir Robert Sidney's. He says, 'I took this opportunity to beseech her to do you one favour, which was to deliver this letter (and shewed it to her) to the Queen; she kissed it and took it, and told me that you had never a friend in Court who would be more ready than herself to do you any pleasure; I besought her, in the love I found she bore you, to take some time this night to do it; and, without asking anything at all of the contents of it, she put it in her bosom and assured me that this night, or to-morrow morning, it would be read, and bid me attend her.' Which makes us feel a waft of cordial warmth breathed from a kindly-affectioned heart, as the letter disappears in its temporary resting-place.

THOMAS THORPE,

AND HIS

'ONLIE BEGETTER' OF THE SONNETS.

WE are now able to deal with the Inscription written by Thomas Thorpe, and bring it within the domain of positive facts, instead of leaving its meaning to remain any longer a matter of opinion. I am not sure that it is without a touch of malicious satisfaction that I place Thorpe after the Sonnets for the first time! Whilst standing full in front of them, darkening the doorway, and almost shutting Shakspeare out of sight, he has given me a great deal of trouble. And yet, he is not so much to blame for the perplexity, as others are. I venture to doubt that the Elizabethans, who knew their man, ever mistook his meaning, or were misled by his onlie begetter. This was left to the discoverers of later times, in which Thorpe's Inscription, rather than Shakspeare's Sonnets, has become the main object of critical interest and ingenuity, and Thorpe's shallowness not Shakspeare's depth has received all the attention of efforts which have been vain as it would be to try and gauge the depths of azure heaven in the reflex of a road-side puddle. So completely has this inscription on the outside been interposed betwixt us and the Poet's own writing, that the only aim of the efforts hitherto made to decipher the secret history of the sonnets does

THORPE'S INSCRIPTION.

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but amount to an attempt at discovering a man who should be young in years, handsome in person, loose in character; the initials of whose name must be W. H. The discoverers being quite ignorant at the outset of their enterprise as to what Thorpe himself knew of the sonnets; what he really meant by his onlie begetter,' and liable, after all, to be met with the fatal fact that he used the word 'begetter' in its more remote, its original sense, and thus inscribed the sonnets, with his best wishes, to the person who might be legitimately called the only obtainer' of them for him to print. We are now in a position to grapple with Thorpe's Inscription

TO. THE ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF .

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A Shakspeare scholar who had read my Article on Shakspeare and his Sonnets' in the 'Quarterly Review,' admitted that he could not answer my arguments, which had been urged to show that if the sonnets ever had an only begetter' in the creative sense, the Earl of Southampton must have been the man, but he utterly refused, he said, to believe that the Earl of Southampton was Shakspeare's Master W. H. Thus missing the very obvious point, that there is no such person as Shakspeare's 'Mr. W. H.!' This mistake has been common with most who have touched the subject. If the Poet himself had penned the dedication, then no amount of labour could have been

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wasted in fathoming its import. The word 'begetter’ would then, however, have had but one possible meaning. But the Inscription is not Shakspeare's; the only begetter' and the Mr. W. H.' are not his; they are only Thomas Thorpe's! He, the Bookseller, having got the sonnets into his hands, wishes 'Mr. W. H.,' whom he calls the only begetter,' all happiness and that eternity promised by Shakspeare in the sonnets. He does not say that the Poet promised immortality to Mr. W. H.; but he, Thomas Thorpe, wishes it to him, in setting forth the sonnets. From this inscription it has been assumed that Thorpe dedicated the sonnets to their only objective creator-the man who begot them in Shakspeare's mind, and that this Master W. H. was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Not that any worthy attempt has been made to solve a problem or grapple with a great difficulty! Nor has Herbert ever been wedded to the sonnets by any identification of facts; no single proof having been produced! We have had an inference drawn from Thorpe's Inscription, not in the least a result of reading the Sonnets of Shakspeare! A closer study has led the French Critic, M. Chasles, to perceive how untenable is the hypothesis that William Herbert was the only Begetter' of the sonnets in the sense now commonly supposed, and he has tried to make extremes meet by a new reading of Thorpe's dedication, earnestly as though there were but one use of the word begetter, and as though Thorpe must of necessity have known all about the sonnets, and the secret relationship of the persons concerned! His new interpretation may be given in his own series of conclusions:- 1. That we have here no dedication, properly so called, at all, but a kind of monumental inscription. 2. That this inscription has not one continuous sense, but is broken up into two distinct sentences. 3. That the former sentence contains the real inscription, which is addressed by and not to W. H. 4. That the person to whom the inscription is addressed

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