Lucrece, but we have no means of fixing the time with any precision.

The Shakespearian poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were of course written before 1599, when the collection was published. The three taken from Love's Labour's Lost must be as early as the date of that play (see our ed. p. 10). If the Venus and Adonis sonnets are Shakespeare's, they may have been experiments on the subject before writing the long poem; but Furnivall says that they are "so much easier in flow and lighter in handling" that he cannot suppose them to be earlier than the poem.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is almost certainly Shakespeare's, and must have been written before 1601.

II. THE SOURCES OF THE POEMS.

The story of the Venus and Adonis was doubtless taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which had been translated by Golding in 1567. Shakespeare was probably acquainted with this translation at the time of the composition of The Tempest (see our ed. p. 139, note on Ye elves, etc.); but we have no clear evidence that he made use of it in writing Venus and Adonis. He does not follow Ovid very closely. That poet "relates, shortly, that Venus, accidentally wounded by an arrow of Cupid's, falls in love with the beauteous Adonis, leaves her favourite haunts and the skies for him, and follows him in his huntings over mountains and bushy rocks, and through woods. She warns him against wild boars and lions. She and he lie down in the shade on the grass-he without pressure on her part; and there, with her bosom on his, she tells him, with kisses,* the story of how she helped Hippomenes to win the swift-footed Atalanta, and then, because he was ungrateful to her (Venus), she excited him and his wife to defile a sanctuary by a forbidden

“And, in her tale, she bussed him among."-A. Golding. Ovid's Met., leaf 129 bk., ed. 1602.

act, for which they were both turned into lions. With a final warning against wild beasts, Venus leaves Adonis. He then hunts a boar, and gets his death-wound from it. Venus comes down to see him die, and turns his blood into a flower- the anemone, or wind-flower, short-lived, because the winds (anemoi), which give it its name, beat it down,* SO slender is it. Other authors give Venus the enjoyment which Ovid and Shakspere deny her, and bring Adonis back from Hades to be with her " (Furnivall).

The main incidents of the Lucrece were doubtless familiar to Shakespeare from his school-days; and they had been used again and again in poetry and prose. "Chaucer had, in his Legende of Good Women (A.D. 1386?), told the story of Lucrece, after those of Cleopatra, Dido, Thisbe, Ypsiphile, and Medea, As saythe Ovyde and Titus Lyvyus' (Ovid's Fasti, bk. ii. 741; Livy, bk. i. ch. 57, 58): the story is also told by Dionysius Halicarnassensis, bk. iv. ch. 72, and by Diodorus Siculus, Dio Cassius, and Valerius Maximus. In English it is besides in Lydgate's Falles of Princes, bk. iii. ch. 5, and in Wm. Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567, vol. i. fol. 5-7, where the story is very shortly told: the heading is 'Sextus Tarquinius ravisheth Lucrece, who bewailyng the losse of her chastitie, killeth her self.' I cannot find the story in the Rouen edition, 1603, of Boaistuau and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, 7 vols. 12mo; or the Lucca edition, 1554, of the Novelle of Bandello, 3 parts; or the Lyons edition, 1573, of the Fourth Part. Painter's short Lucrece must have been taken by himself from one of the Latin authors he cites as his originals at the end of his preface. In 1568, was entered on the Stat. Reg. A, lf. 174, a receipt for 4d. from Jn. Alde 'for his lycense for prynting of a ballett, the grevious complaynt of Lucrece' (Arber's Transcript, i. 379); and in 1570 the like from James Robertes, for his lycense for the prynt*Pliny (bk. i. c. 23) says it never opens but when the wind is blow

inge of a ballett intituled The Death of Lucryssia' (Arber's Transcript, i. 416). Another ballad of the legend of Lucrece was also printed in 1576, says Warton. (Var. Shakspeare, xx. 100.) Chaucer's simple, short telling of the story in 206 lines-of which 95 are taken up with the visit of Collatyne and Tarquynyus to Rome, before Shakspere's start with Tarquin's journey thither alone cannot of course compare with Shakspere's rich and elaborate poem of 1855 lines, though, had the latter had more of the earlier maker's brevity, it would have attained greater fame" (Furnivall).

III. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON THE POEMS.

[From Knight's "Pictorial Shakspere." *]

"If the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather." These are the words which, in relation to the Venus and Adonis, Shakspere addressed, in 1593, to the Earl of Southampton. Are we to accept them literally? Was the Venus and Adonis the first production of Shakspere's imagination? Or did he put out of his view those dramatic performances which he had then unquestionably produced, in deference to the critical opinions which regarded plays as works not belonging to "invention"? We think that he used the words in a literal sense. We regard the Venus and Adonis as the production of a very young man, improved, perhaps, considerably in the interval. between its first composition and its publication, but distinguished by peculiarities which belong to the wild luxuriance of youthful power,-such power, however, as few besides Shakspere have ever possessed.

A deep thinker and eloquent writer, Julius Charles Hare, thus describes "the spirit of self-sacrifice," as applied to poetry:

"The might of the imagination is manifested by its launch*Vol. ii. of Tragedies, etc., p. 509 fol.

ing forth from the petty creek, where the accidents of birth moored it, into the wide ocean of being,-by its going abroad into the world around, passing into whatever it meets with, animating it, and becoming one with it. This complete union and identification of the poet with his poem,-this suppression of his own individual insulated consciousness, with its narrowness of thought and pettiness of feeling,-is what we admire in the great masters of that which for this reason we justly call classical poetry, as representing that which is symbolical and universal, not that which is merely occasional and peculiar. This gives them that majestic calmness which still breathes upon us from the statues of their gods. This invests their works with that lucid transparent atmosphere wherein every form stands out in perfect definiteness and distinctness, only beautified by the distance which idealizes it. This has delivered those works from the casualties of time and space, and has lifted them up like stars into the pure firmament of thought, so that they do not shine on one spot alone, nor fade like earthly flowers, but journey on from clime to clime, shedding the light of beauty on generation after generation. The same quality, amounting to a total extinction of his own selfish being, so that his spirit became a mighty organ through which Nature gave utterance to the full diapason of her notes, is what we wonder at in our own great dramatist, and is the groundwork of all his other powers for it is only when purged of selfishness that the intellect becomes fitted for receiving the inspirations of genius."*

What Mr. Hare so justly considers as the great moving principle of "classical poetry,"—what he further notes as the pre-eminent characteristic of "our own great dramatist," is abundantly found in that great dramatist's earliest work. Coleridge was the first to point out this pervading

The Victory of Faith; and other Sermons, by Julius Charles Hare, M.A. (1840), p. 277.

quality in the Venus and Adonis; and he has done this so admirably that it would be profanation were we to attempt to elucidate the point in any other than his own words:

"It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think I should have conjectured from these poems that even then the great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of imagery, always vivid, and, because unbroken, often minute-by the highest effort of the picturesque in words of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted-to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader,from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images,-and, above all, from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst,-that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate