trinsic facts being found in those poems themselves. Looking at either or both of these modes of investigating Shakspeare's life, I can see no glaring proof of deficient acumen in his commentators on their failing to biographize him by the help of his sonnets; and I should have pitied Schlegel himself if he had been condemned, with all these poems about him, as reflecting telescopes, to make the history of Shakspeare importantly more distinct. What were the commentators to discover in these sonnets?-I mean, what clear and circumstantial facts—for it is too bad to blame biographers for not tracing the history of a man's life by the aid of documents that furnish only conjectures and surmises. I venture to say that the facts attested by the sonnets can be held in a nutshell-that they do not unequivocally paint the actual situtation of the poet, or in all instances give us a draught of his sentiments that is to be literally interpreted-that they do not make us acquainted with his passions, so as to throw any new light upon his history which can be called, in the slightest degree, important or satisfactory-and, that they do not contain any confession of the most remarkable errors of his youthful years.

To begin with the last of these points, the only part of the sonnets that can be pretended to contain any specific confession on the part of Shakspeare of his own immorality, are those which are dedicated to an apparently frail female; and the error to which he there alludes, assuming his gallantry to have been real and criminal, was not an affair of his youth, but of a period of his life

"When age in love loves not to have years told;"

for he speaks of himself in Sonnet 138

"Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best."

I may be reminded, indeed, that the discovery of frailty in a great man's life, unpleasant as it may be, is not diminished in importance by its appearing to have been the error of his graver years; and I must own, that if we are to interpret this love-affair by the letter of his own confession, we shall be obliged to acknowledge that our immortal bard had not always the fear of Doctors' Commons before his eyes. But my present object is neither to advocate nor to impeach the immaculate morality of Shakspeare, so that I waive discussing the possibility of the whole affair having been limited to paper and poetry. The simple point on which I insist is this, that magnify this discovery as much as you please into the broadest shade on Shakspeare's conjugal character, it throws no light on his biography beyond a solitary, insulated, and most obscure incident, illustrating, at the worst, without name of, or accompanying circumstances, the mighty truth that Shakspeare's virtue was not infallible. Having promised not to visit the reader with any special argumentation on the possible chance of the poet having, in these sonnets to his lady-mistress, exaggerated the nature of their intercourse, I will keep my word with him; for it is difficult to prove a negative, and dry to dwell on matter of pure conjecture, though I may leave a mere hint to his charity not to lose all sight of such a possibility. Dr. Drake, I know, is by no means so indifferent on this subject, as to trust the above hypothesis in the poet's favour to fortuitous

candour, but flies to strengthen the defensive pass with a host of argu-
ments, tending to prove that, Shakspeare having been then a father and
a married man, the amour must have been all reverie and chimera.
The Doctor, at the same time, laments that the sonnets ever made their
appearance. But if we treat the whole matter as imaginary, why la-
ment the testimonies of a verbal amour? and if the fact was otherwise,
I can see no great benefit that could result to the world from believing
any one man that ever existed to have been more immaculate than he
really was. But Dr. Drake goes farther, and, not very consistently
with his own system, abuses the lady, calling her profligate, and the
worst woman (we must suppose Juvenal's heroines included) that was
ever described by the pen of a poet. There is reason in roasting eggs,
Dr. Drake; and let there be reason also before you scorch to black-
ness the memory of a poor female. If the affair was unreal, where was
the guilt of this anonymous lady? and if it was not unreal, Shakspeare,
in as far as they were both concerned, must have been as profligate as
herself, and, apparently, less excusable, since he was, according to his
own account, an elderly personage, who ought to have edified, and not
assailed her with his "sugared" sonnets. As to his accusations of her,
they go, with me, for nothing on either supposition. In the case of the
matter having been mere coquetry, we know not what the lady might
have had to say for herself; or supposing that she had nothing to say,
her offence was venial. If it was otherwise, Shakspeare, with reverence
be it spoken, yes, the great Shakspeare, appears only in the light of a
kiss-and-tell king's evidence, who, indeed, himself gives us warning that
he is not always to be believed. Thus in the 140th sonnet he says,
"For if I should despair, I should grow mad,

And in my madness might speak ill of thee;
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be."

I am aware, nevertheless, such is the spell of interest connected with Shakspeare's name, that the mind starts with avidity at the most distant prospect of any novelty respecting him, and submits with impatience to believe, that if any new fact can be ascertained, it may not be made a practicable stepping-stone to some farther information. It may be feared, too, that the circumstance of such intelligence justifying little alarm about the spotless sanctity of the poet, instead of acting as a sedative to human interest, has rather a tendency to increase the palpitation and solicitude, and morbid vigilance of the curiosity. I am, therefore, not unprepared for being told, that in this suspicious lovelanguage of Shakspeare there is room for a world of profound reflections and meditation. The stern moralist, keeping to the letter of the sonnets, will find them a text for no unfair inculpation of Mr. Malone, who has groundlessly insinuated that the bard was jealous of his wife. He will turn all the pathos of this matter of scandal to the side of our sympathy with Mrs. Shakspeare, who was perhaps, poor soul! with her own hands, watering the very mulberry-tree of her graceless bard in their Staffordshire garden, at the moment when he in London was gadding after a married woman, and recording in rhyme their double adultery and compound fracture of the marriage vow. How humbling it is to the species, he will add, to find the man, who held up, as it

were, a mirror to nature, thus detected in its reflection, "playing such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep!" It will be also pleaded, perhaps, that these illicit effusions seem to illustrate that alleged contempt for his wife which is so acutely discovered in the poet's will. It will save us, however, from being plunged into such deep moralization by a few sonnets, if we reflect that all this conjugal contempt assigned to the mighty poet, is screwed by the hardest inference out of circumstances most imperfectly known to us, and that, in spite of his interlineated will, and this sonnet-sung attachment, we see him retiring, when but little past the prime of life, very unlike a man who had been weaned from domestic affections, to spend the residue of his days with the mother of his children.

I have said, that the addition which these sonnets afford to our knowledge of Shakspeare, is insignificant as an index to his biography, and I shall not feel the assertion falsified, though I should see persons of more ingenuity than I can pretend to, eliciting many brilliant conjectures from their contents. I can only say that I have outlived all taste for conjectural biographies, and that the truths brought to view by these effusions seem to me to be neither numerous nor momentous. We learn from them that Shakspeare had a friend, to whom he was devotedly attached, (the nature of his language to that friend I shall by and by consider,) and a poetical mistress, who, not satisfied with inroads on the poet's heart, carried her conquests even to that of his friend, and made Shakspeare sonnetize on his jealousy of too much tenderness subsisting between them. It appears, however, that he never broke with his friend on this account, so that his love-passion must have been a humbler sort of lodger in his heart, that could put up without either the whole or the best of its apartments. Other casual moods of his mind are expressed with an air of sincerity, which I deny not to be interesting as insulated records of his feelings, though I still refuse them the character of new or indicative importance as to his history. He speaks to his friend, in certain passages, with extreme modesty as to his own poetical merit, and alludes, with an admiration that is beautifully unenvious, to some other poet of the time who had won the favour of his friend. He writes on one or two occasions in apparent dejection under the frowns of fortune, and in one sonnet, distinctly laments being obliged to live by the vocation of a player. If there be any other interesting allusions in these sonnets to his personal circumstances, it is from want of memory that I have unintentionally omitted them.

I am making no hair-splitting distinction when I would emphatically distinguish the general, and even vague, but still actual pleasure, which we enjoy in these sonnets, from hearing the welcome voice of Shakspeare express his casual and transient feelings, and the falsely-imagined pleasure that he is telling us something new about himself, which tradition, or his other poems, had not told us, and which may conse quently be regarded as new testimonies for tracing his life. We learn from a hundred sonnets that he was a devoted friend, but if we possessed not one of these, would it ever enter into our suspicions that he was cold-blooded in friendship? We find him, in effusions of the same sort, confessing to the influence of the softer flame; and will those who have ever felt to their heart's core his power in the drama of describing love, pretend that they would have repudiated their

sympathy, if they had suspected that he had drawn his amatory experience from the admiration of any other woman than his own good old Anne Hathaway? Some of the Sonnets indicate that he was subject to casual misfortunes; and what ghost or sonnet was required to make us believe as much? It may be alleged that these complaints seem to contradict the general prosperity which is attributed to the course of his life, on the supposition of which Dr. Johnson, using the bard's own beautiful simile, says, that he seems to have shaken off the difficulties of fortune like "dew-drops from the lion's mane!" But what man, even the most prosperous, were he to journalize his feelings in sonnets, would not record himself a thousand times poorer, and more unhappy on one day than another?

He praises one of his contemporaries in the sonnets, and he could well afford to do so. Drummond's account of him supersedes the necessity for any other proof that he was gentle, good-natured, and amiable. He speaks very humbly of himself in certain passages. This leads us, however, to no discovery that he was blind to his own mighty endowments; for in other passages he freely paraphrases, and applies to himself the "exegi monumentum" of Horace. The only very

striking phenomenon in the Sonnets is, that he predicts immortality to himself from those effusions, and not from his dramas-an opinion which the world has thought proper to falsify. Lastly, the Sonnets allude to his being a player, and to his disliking the profession-had they told us the reverse, there would have been some novelty in the information. Only twenty-two of these Sonnets are addressed to a lady, whose name has not even been guessed at; and of whom, if we except what the poet himself calls his "mad slanders," nothing is known, but that she had dark eyes, and dark hair, and played the virginal. More than a hundred of his Sonnets are addressed to his male friend, of whom still less, if possible, is discoverable. We may be told, perhaps, that these poems are, nevertheless, the record of a deep and strong personal friendship, and that if you divest those effusions of an exaggerated amatory garb, the mere fashion of the age, in Shakspeare's language to a male friend, they illustrate the strength of his friendly attachment. I believe that they record a very strong and pure friendship, but I deny that they unequivocally paint his passions, and the true character of his sentiments. Of the love Sonnets to the lady let us think as literally as we please—but to take his friendship Sonnets according to the letter of their phraseology, I should be very sorry. Those friendship Sonnets are not the work of Shakspeare writing in his own unaffected character, how sincere soever the friendship itself may have been, but the fantastical language of a friend in poetical masquerade, exaggerating friendship into love, and painting his sentiments in hyperbolical colours. This is surely not the unequivocal language of passion. That the fashion of the age makes Shakspeare's real sentiments unblameable, is unquestionable; for persons of the same sex, in those days, wrote downright erotic sonnets to each other most innocently, and a man subscribed himself, your lover, meaning no more than at present he means by "your humble servant." But keeping the poet's own real sentiments in unquestioned sincerity apart-the poems themselves are tinged by the chartered hyperbole of the age, with a jealousy and misery in the sentiment of friendship which are foreign to its nature. The great heart

of Shakspeare, when it bestowed its friendship, must have bestowed it largely; but, believing this as I do, I would rather refresh my deep and sacred impression of the belief by a reperusal of his other works, than of some of these Sonnets, in looking to which it is one thing to abjure most solemnly and sincerely any moral blame of him for his exaggeration, and another thing to admire the hyperbolical as a matter of taste, or to admit it as an index to the history of his life. As a guide to the history of his life, those Sonnets to his male friend are indeed but faint scintillations. It seems impossible to make out to whom they were dedicated. Dr. Drake very plausibly, but by no means, I think, conclusively, contends that their object was Lord Southampton. If this be the fact, it is rather odd to find the poet calling a peer of the realm "his sweet boy," at a time when his Lordship must have been thirty-six years of age. Mr. George Chalmers, whose ingenuity always repays its errors, by giving ample occasion for a laugh, insists that they were addressed to Queen Elizabeth. What must her unsexed Majesty have thought of the 20th Sonnet?

Considering these Sonnets merely as poems, without reference to their biographical importance, it is manifest that some of them lack an important characteristic of true poetry, namely, their being genuine draughts of the poet's mind; for when he extols the personal charms and complexion of his friend, we recognize only his assumption of a fictitious character, borrowed in moments of thoughtless accordance from the capricious rhodomantade of the times. To take the fashion of the age, and its unmeaning licence of language, into allowance, would be but justice to him if he were the commonest sonneteer, but most emphatically is it due to his hallowed memory as the master of the human heart. Still, at the same time, that very allowance leaves his language to be held unmeaning, and therefore, in several passages, uninteresting. Many of the Sonnets, nevertheless, express an unexaggerated friendship that is truly Shakspearian and endearing; and the fancy, harmony, and diction of the greater portion of the whole collection betoken the hand of a master. They form, altogether, the best of our sonnet poetry anterior to that of Drummond; for George Steevens's comparison of them with Watson's productions is unworthy of an answer. If the same Commentator's question, "What have truth and nature to do with sonnets?" deserve any reply, we may simply extinguish it, by telling him that they have as much to do with the sonnet as with any other short species of poem. It is very true, that any long series of effusions, clothed in uniform metre, inspired with slightly varying sentiments, and devoted to the same subject, will produce, when collectively read, a certain monotonous effect, from which I cannot deny that these sonnets are totally free any more than those of Petrarch. It is delightful to take a short walk through side-rows of sweet-briars and honey-suckle; but it would tire us to make a day's journey through interminable alleys of them. There is no necessity, however, for our making a toil of a pleasure in reading the sonnets of either Shakspeare or Petrarch, for the character of tædium belongs not to those pieces individually, any more than the pressure of a crowd belongs to the presence of a single person. To say that these Sonnets add but little to Shakspeare's fame, is as excusable as to say that a considerable rock might appear but as a pebble if it were piled on the top of Olympus. But in many of them, all the majesty and grace of Shakspeare is as distinct, and impress us with that