of a painful German commentator (Barnstorff), that Mr. W. H. is none other than Mr. William Himself. When Thorpe uses the words "the adventurer in setting forth," perhaps he meant to compare himself to one of the young volunteers in the days of Elizabeth and James, who embarked on naval enterprises, hoping to make their fortunes by discovery or conquest; so he with good wishes took his risk on the sea of public favour in this light venture of the Sonnets.*

The date at which the Sonnets were written, like their origin, is uncertain. In Willobie's Avisa, 1594, in commendatory verse prefixed to which occurs the earliest printed mention of Shakspere by name, H. W. (Henry Willobie), pining with love for Avisa, bewrays his disease to his familiar friend W. S., "who not long before had tried the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered of the like infection." W. S. encourages his friend in a passion which he knows must be hopeless, intending to view this "loving Comedy" from far off, in order to learn "whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player." From Canto 44 to 48 of Avisa, W. S. addresses H. W. on his love-affair, and H. W. replies. It is remarkable that Canto 47 in form and substance bears resemblance to the stanzas in The Passionate Pilgrim beginning "Whenas thine eye hath chose the dame." Assuming that W. S. is William Shakespeare, we learn that he had loved unwisely, been laughed at, and recovered from the infection of his passion before the end of 1594. It seemed impossible to pass by a poem which has been described as the one contemporary book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light on the mystic matter" of the Sonnets. But although the reference to W. S., his passion for Avisa fair and chaste, and his recovery, be matter of interest to inquirers after Shakspere's life, Willobie's Avisa seems to *See Dr. Grosart's Donne, vol. ii. pp. 45, 46.

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me to have no point of connection with the Sonnets of Shakspere.*

...

Various attempts have been made by English, French, and German students to place the Sonnets in a new and better order, of which attempts no two agree between themselves. That the Sonnets are not printed in the quarto, 1609, at haphazard, is evident from the fact that the Envoy, 126, is rightly placed; that poems addressed to a mistress follow those addressed to a friend; and that the two Cupid and Dian sonnets stand together at the close. A nearer view makes it apparent that in the first series (1–126) a continuous story is conducted through various stages to its termination; a more minute inspection discovers points of contact or connection between sonnet and sonnet, and a natural sequence of thought, passion, and imagery. We are in the end convinced that no arrangement which has been proposed is as good as that of the quarto. But the force of this remark seems to me to apply with certainty only to Sonnets 1-126. The second series (127-154), although some of its pieces are evidently connected with those which stand near them, does not exhibit a like intelligible sequence; a better arrangement may, perhaps, be found; or, it may be, no possible arrangement can educe order out of the struggles between will and judgment, between blood and reason; tumult and chaos are, perhaps, a portion of their life and being.

A piece of evidence confirming the opinion here advanced will be found in the use of thou and you by Shakspere as a mode of address to his friend. Why thou or you is chosen, is not always explicable; sometimes the choice seems to be determined by considerations of euphony; sometimes of

* The force of the allusion to tragedy and comedy is weakened by the fact that we find in Alcilia (1595) the course of love spoken of as a tragicomedy, where no reference to a real actor on the stage is intended: "Sic incipit stultorum Tragicomoedia."

rhyme; sometimes intimate affection seems to indicate the use of you, and respectful homage that of thou; but this is by no means invariable. What I would call attention to, however, as exhibiting something like order and progress in the arrangement of 1609, is this: that in the first fifty sonnets, you is of extremely rare occurrence, in the second fifty you and thou alternate in little groups of sonnets, thou having still a preponderance, but now only a slight preponderance; in the remaining twenty-six, you becomes the ordinary mode of address, and thou the exception. In the sonnets to a mistress, thou is invariably employed. A few sonnets of the first series, as 63-68, have "my love," and the third person throughout.*

Whether idealizing reality or wholly fanciful, an Elizabethan book of sonnets was-not always, but in many instances-made up of a chain or series of poems, in a designed or natural sequence, viewing in various aspects a single theme, or carrying on a love-story to its issue, prosperous or the reverse. Sometimes advance is made through the need of discovering new points of view, and the movement, always delayed, is rather in a circuit than straight forward. In Spenser's Amoretti we read the progress of love from humility through hope to conquest. In Astrophel and

* I cannot here present detailed statistics. Thou and you are to be considered only when addressing friend or lover, not Time, the Muse,

etc.

Five sets of sonnets may then be distinguished: 1. Using thou. 2. Using you. 3. Using neither, but belonging to a thou group. 4. Using neither, but belonging to a you group. 5. Using both (24). I had hoped that this investigation was left to form one of my gleanings. But Professor Goedeke, in the Deutsche Rundschau, March, 1877, looked into the matter; his results seem to me vitiated by an arbitrary division of the sonnets using neither thou nor you into groups of eleven and twelve, and by a fantastic theory that Shakspere wrote his sonnets in books or groups

of fourteen each.

1 In his larger ed., published later, Dowden adds a tabular classification of the Son nets under the five heads mentioned.-Ed.

29

Stella, we read the story of passion struggling with untoward fate, yet at last mastered by the resolve to do high deeds:

"Sweet! for a while give respite to my heart

Which pants as though it still would leap to thee;

And on my thoughts give thy Lieutenancy

To this great Cause."

In Parthenophil and Parthenophe the story is of a new love. supplanting an old, of hot and cold fevers, of despair, and, as last effort of the desperate lover, of an imagined attempt to subdue the affections of his cruel lady by magic art. But in reading Sidney, Spenser, Barnes, and still more, Watson, Constable, Drayton, and others, although a large element of the art-poetry of the Renascence is common to them and Shakspere, the student of Shakspere's Sonnets does not feel at home. It is when we open Daniel's Delia that we recognize close kinship. The manner is the same, though the master proves himself of tardier imagination and less ardent temper. Diction, imagery, rhymes, and, in sonnets of like form, versification, distinctly resemble those of Shakspere. Malone was surely right when he recognized in Daniel the master of Shakspere as a writer of sonnets- —a master quickly excelled by his pupil. And it is in Daniel that we find sonnet starting from sonnet almost in Shakspere's manner, only that Daniel often links poem with poem in more formal wise, the last or the penultimate line of one poem supplying the first line of that which immediately follows.

Let us attempt to trace briefly the sequence of incidents and feelings in the Sonnets 1-126. A young man, beautiful, brilliant, and accomplished, is the heir of a great house; he is exposed to temptations of youth, and wealth, and rank. Possibly his mother desires to see him married; certainly it is the desire of his friend. "I should be glad if you were caught," writes Languet to Philip Sidney, " that so you might give to your country sons like yourself." "If you marry a wife, and if you beget children like yourself, you will be do

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ing better service to your country than if you were to cut the throats of a thousand Spaniards and Frenchmen." 'Sir,' said Croesus to Cambyses," Languet writes to Sidney, now aged twenty-four, "I consider your father must be held your better, because he was the father of an admirable prince, whereas you have as yet no son like yourself." It is in the manner of Sidney's own Cecropia that Shakspere urges marriage upon his friend.* "Nature when you were first born, vowed you a woman, and as she made you child of a mother, so to do your best to be mother of a child" (Sonnet 13. 14); "she gave you beauty to move love; she gave you wit to know love; she gave you an excellent body to reward love; which kind of liberal rewarding is crowned with an unspeakable felicity. For this as it bindeth the receiver, so it makes happy the bestower; this doth not impoverish, but enrich the giver (6. 6). O the comfort of comforts, to see your children grow up, in whom you are as it were eternized!... Have you seen a pure Rose-water kept in a crystal glass, how fine it looks, how sweet it smells, while that beautiful glass imprisons it! Break the prison and let the water take his own course, doth it not embrace the dust, and lose all his former sweetness and fairness; truly so are we, if we have not the stay, rather than the restraint of Crystalline marriage (5); ... And is a solitary life as good as this? then can one string make as good music as a consort (8)."

In like manner Shakspere urges the youth to perpetuate his beauty in offspring (1-17). But if Will refuses, then. his poet will make war against Time and Decay, and confer immortality upon his beloved one by Verse (15-19). Will is the pattern and exemplar of human beauty (19), so uniting in himself the perfections of man and woman (20); this

*Arcadia, lib. iii. Noticed by Mr. Massey in his Shakespeare's Sonnets and his Private Friends, pp. 36, 37.

† In what follows, to avoid the confusion of he and him, we call Shakspere's friend, as he is called in 135, Will.