O when shall Englishmen
With such acts fill a pen,

Or England breed again
Such a King Harry!"

There is something of the same fire in his poem on the same glorious battle, though it is weighted and obscured by the laborious circumstantiality, the industrious particularisation, which is so conspicuous also in his "Polyolbion." He names the various ships, and describes the colours and ensigns of the various companies, with Homeric minuteness and more than Homeric ardour: and realises such scenes as the two camps on the night before the battle with great variety of vivid details. His circumstantiality sometimes has the powerful effect so often remarked in the descriptions of Defoe for example, the following incidents in the siege of Harfleur:

:

'Now upon one side you should hear a cry

And all that quarter clouded with a smother;
The like from that against it by and by,

As though the one were echo to the other,
The king and Clarence so their turns can ply;

And valiant Glo'ster shows himself their brother,
Whose mines to the besieged more mischief do,
Than with the assaults above, the other two.

An old man sitting by the fireside

Decrepit with extremity of age,

Stilling his little grandchild when it cried,

Almost distracted with the batteries' rage;

Sometimes doth speak it fair, sometimes doth chide :
As thus he seeks its mourning to assuage,
By chance a bullet doth the chimney hit,
Which falling in doth kill both him and it.
Whilst the sad weeping mother sits her down,
To give her little new-born babe the pap,
A luckless quarry, levelled at the town,

Kills the sweet baby sleeping in her lap,
That with the fright she falls into a swoon;

From which awaked, and mad with the mishap,

As up a rampier shrieking she doth climb,

Comes a great shot, and strikes her limb from limb.

Whilst a sort run confusedly to quench

Some palace burning, or some fired street,

Called from where they were fighting in the trench,
They in their way with balls of wildfire meet,

So plagued are the miserable French,

Not above head but also under feet;
For the fierce English vow the town to take,
Or of it soon a heap of stones to make.

Hot is the siege, the English coming on

As men so long to be kept out that scorn,
Careless of wounds, as they were made of stone,
As with their teeth the walls they would have torn :
Into a breach who quickly is not gone,

Is by the next behind him overborne ;

So that they found a place that gave them way,
They never cared what danger therein lay."

If his sonnets have no great intrinsic interest, they derive a certain adventitious interest from their illustrative bearing on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The following, with its curious points of resemblance to Shakespeare's 144th sonnet -"Two loves I have of comfort and despair "—raises a doubt whether that perplexing sonnet is not more figurative than is commonly supposed. If I am right in my recollection that it did not appear before the edition of 1602, it may have been imitated from Shakespeare's, which appeared in 1599; and at any rate, taken in connection with the last lines of Shakespeare's sonnet, it raises the question whether Shakespeare's worser spirit was so serious an evil as the first part of the sonnet represents.

"An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still,

Wherewith, alas! I have been long possesst,
Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill,
Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest:
In me it speaks whether I sleep or wake,
And when by means to drive it out I try,
With greater torments then it me doth take,
And tortures me in most extremity :
Before my face it lays down my despairs
And hastes me on unto a sudden death;

S

Now tempting me to drown myself in tears
And then in sighing to give up my breath :
Thus am I still provoked to every evil

By this good wicked spirit, sweet angel devil."

In Drayton's sonnets we find several of the conceits that appear in Shakespeare's, such as the warfare between heart and eyes and the play upon the identity of the lover and his beloved; but it may perhaps be more serviceable to quote his version of another commonplace, the promise of immortality to his mistress, to help to correct a vulgar notion that Shakespeare stood alone in the lofty confidence of eternal memory.

"How many paltry, foolish, painted things,

That now in coaches trouble every street,
Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,

Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet!
Where I to thee eternity shall give,

When nothing else remaineth of these days,
And queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise;
Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes,
Shall be so much delighted with thy story,
That they shall grieve they lived not in these times
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory:
So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng
Still to survive in my immortal song."

"Stay, speedy Time, behold before thou pass,

From age to age, what thou hast sought to see,
One in whom all the excellencies be;
In whom Heaven looks itself as in a glass :
Time, look thou too in this tralucent glass

And thy youth past in this pure mirror see,
As the world's beauty in his infancy,
What it was then, and thou before it was;
Pass on, and to posterity tell this;

Yet see thou tell but truly what hath been:
Say to our nephews, that thou once hast seen
In perfect human shape, all heavenly bliss :
And bid them mourn, nay more, despair with thee
When she is gone, her like again to see."

After a survey of the huge issue of sonnets between 1591 and 1594, the characteristics of the sonnets of Shakespeare seem to stand out with greater distinctness. They divide themselves into three classes. First come the sonnets of the 'Passionate Pilgrim,' some of which rise out of the relations between Venus and Adonis, and most of which are in the same strain, treating the theme of love with a certain lightness. Next come the twenty-six sonnets placed among his Sonnets so-called, between the 127th and the 152d inclusive: sonnets sufficiently alarming at first sight, but not so very terrible when we examine them boldly. Finally comes the main body of his sonnets, addressed to his friend. These are in every way more powerful and mature. The second and third classes are, as we shall see, strongly contrasted in sentiment with the effusions of preceding son

neteers.

In 1598, one Francis Meres, in a work entitled 'Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury' eulogised the various English poets, finding parallels for them among the Greek and Latin poets. Among others, he remarked on Shakespeare, and said "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, &c." The sonnets published in the following year in the 'Passionate Pilgrim,' which bore Shakespeare's name on the title-page, fully answer this description: 1 they may with sufficient propriety be said to be animated by the sweet witty soul of Ovid. The rest of Shakespeare's sonnets were

1 Part, at least, of the 'Passionate Pilgrim' was composed by Shakespeare. See Mr Collier's remarks on the subject. I should be disposed to assent to nearly all, if not all, that Messrs Clark and Wright have published as Shakespeare's under that title. (See under "Marlowe.") The name "' sonnet was not confined to quatorzains; several of the Passionate Pilgrim's sonnets are in the six-line staves used in Watson's "Passionate Century of Love."

not published till 1609, when they were issued as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets,' "never before imprinted;" and some critics have asseverated with unaccountable confidence that the second issue must be the sonnets spoken of by Meres, although the publication of them had been delayed. There is not the slightest ground for this assertion: "among his private friends" cannot be taken to mean "to his private friend." In the sonnets of the 'Passionate Pilgrim' there is quite enough to justify the words of Meres. Besides, Meres seems to have made his comparison with some notion of its meaning, seeing that "Venus" and "Lucrece" at once carry us to the Amores and the Heroides; and in the case of the sonnets addressed to a friend the comparison would be wholly inapplicable. Further, the 107th sonnet, containing the line

"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,"

must have been written after the death of Elizabeth, to whose name of "Cynthia" the line is an undoubted refer

ence.

Sonnets cxxvii.-clii. are, as I have said, startling at first sight. They are unmistakably addressed to a woman of loose character, and they seem to represent the poet as involved in a disreputable passion. But when we look more closely into them, we begin to suspect that, if those sonnets are to be treated as bearing all on one subject, we do wrong to take too serious a view of them. One must not treat published sonnets addressed to a courtesan as earnest private correspondence, or as grave confessions whispered in the ear of a ghostly counsellor. I believe that the proper view is to regard them as exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of commonplace. When young Hal was told of his father's triumphs, the humorous youth indulged in a curious eccentricity, which, if I am not in error, represents exactly the spirit of these

sonnets