pense, which was only limited by his great mind, and occasions to use it nobly." He gave himself extremely to licentious pleasures, "yet was not so much transported with beauty and outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind as manifested an extraordinary wit and spirit and knowledge, and administered great pleasure in the conversation. To them he sacrificed himself, his precious time, and much of his fortune." "Some who were nearest his trust and friendship were not without apprehension that his natural vivacity and vigor of mind began to lessen and decline by those excessive indulgences." Here we have all the separate features of the portrait, so marvellously varied, combined, and elaborated in the Sonnets,great beauty, high station, extreme kindness, rich talent, boundless popularity, over-addiction to pleasure. Compare especially with the last sentence quoted from Clarendon the following Sonnet: - "How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, The latest discussion of the subject before us is to be found in a privately printed work by Bolton Corney, of which the London Athenæum for August 2, 1862, gives an account. The work is called, "The Sonnets of William Shakespeare; a Critical Disquisition suggested by a Recent Discovery." The discovery, warmly adopted by Mr. Corney, and indorsed by so considerable an authority as the Athenæum, was made by M. Philarète Chasles, Conservateur de la Bibliothèque Mazarine, whose own elaborate announcement and justification of it will soon issue from the press, if it have not already appeared. The suggestion of M. Chasles, which Mr. Corney considers a discovery equivalent to a demonstration, is this. The person to whom the bulk of the Sonnets were written was, as Drake and others long ago contended, the Earl of Southampton, but the initials in the Dedication are those of William Herbert. The Dedication has been falsely punctuated, and so misunderstood. The real meaning of it is that Mr. W. H. collected the Sonnets, and put them into the hands of a printer for publication, prefixing an inscription to the effect that he hoped the person to whom they were written would experience the joy and reputation promised to him by the author of them. Here the inscription proper ended, but the publisher appended to it his wishes for the success of the pecuniary enterprise on which he had embarked. One might search in vain for a more insignificant, puerile, and useless conceit. How so bright and able a mind as that of M. Chasles could be bewitched and misled by it, can only be explained by the insane fondness of a critic for new readings, making the most absurd speculation which is acute and original more attractive than the most solidly grounded perception which is obvious and familiar. The objections to the "Discovery" are overwhelming. It creates real and fatal difficulties in obviating a single purely imaginary one. It leaves wholly untouched the obstinate truth, that scarcely any of the facts connected with Southampton are reconcilable with the facts, the assertions, and descriptions in the Sonnets. It violently breaks apart the inscription, originally printed as a unit in unbroken continuity of sequence. It puts an arduous and extremely arbitrary interpretation on words whose meaning lies naturally clear and apparent. The Dedication ran connectedly from the first word to the last. With the exception that it was arranged in lines of unequal length, after the usual manner of inscriptions, it stood thus: "To. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF. THESE. INSUING. SONNETS. MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE. AND. THAT. ETERNITIE. PROMISED. BY. OUR. EVER-LIVING. POET. WISHETH. THE. WELL. WISHING. ADVENTURER. IN. SETTING. FORTH. T. T." We submit to any candid reader, that the explanation of M. Chasles, making W. H. the subject instead of the object of the inscription, and making a new inscription, by another hand, begin after the word "wisheth," is utterly capricious and repulsive to common sense. It is absurd to suppose that, when all the parties concerned were associating together, the Earl of Pembroke would, without the consent of the author, so far violate all proprieties as to gather together such effusions as these, dedicate them to their object, and have them printed. Imagine such an act among a similar set of contemporaries now. It is also absurd to suppose that Thomas Thorpe would dare to be guilty of such an outrageous impertinence as to stick his wish and initials upon those written down in such delicate circumstances by the Earl of Pembroke. And, finally, the whole supposition is superfluous; it involves and obscures what was before simple, and sheds no new light on any point of actual interest and perplexity. The personage, then, so exalted, adorned, worshipped, in the Sonnets of Shakespeare, is William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain of King James, Chancellor of Oxford, founder of Pembroke College, who moved in every brilliant circle, the observed of all observers, the most fascinating, envied, and beloved man of his time, a hundred shining virtues linked with one soft fault. That such a man should make a confidential friend of one in the position held in that age by a player was, socially considered, a royal condescension which might well call forth the frequent expressions of humility we find on the part of the poet, and of grateful homage to his so gracious and loving benefactor. "Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Duty so great which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it: Till then, not show my head where thou may'st prove me." Nearly every condition requisite to heighten friendship met in this rare union under the most favorable circumstances. In addition to his other attractions, Herbert was specially qualified to appreciate the productions of Shakespeare, being himself an excellent scholar and a poet of marked skill and taste. His poems, edited by young Donne, indicate the possession of a genius, indeed, that would have won him an imperishable reputation, had he but, instead of occasionally flirting with the Muse, made himself a real devotee of the art. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine describes them as characterized by "delicacy of fancy, sweetness of sentiment, vigor and originality of thought, and enchanting elegance of expression." The following lines are his : "Silence in love betrays more woe Than words though ne'er so witty; Again, on hearing his lady sing, he exclaims: "What voice is this, I prythee mark, Too sweet, methinks, to be a lark, Too loud to be a linnet." When these two first met in London, Shakespeare was thirty-two years old, Herbert sixteen. At least, it is known that Herbert went to London at that age, and was a lover of the theatre," spent his time in merely going to plays every day." In April, 1697, a few days after the young William had passed his sixteenth year, Rowland Whyte writes to Sir Robert Sidney, uncle to the lad: "My lord Herbert hath, with much adoe, brought his father to consent that he may live at London." The rich eye and heart of the poet were captivated by the entrancing beauty of the noble youth, who, in his turn, must have been delighted with the delicate homage and lavish genius laid at his feet, as he burst upon the hackneyed gaze of the metropolis in the full splendor of his morning promise. "Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring." The Sonnets addressed to him during the thirteen following years were then collected and published by a bookseller, withVOL. LXXIII.-5TH S. VOL. XI. NO. III. 36 out the privity of their author, every step and varying phase of whose ideal passion, with the attending events, are depicted in them. To the reader able to interpret, they still mutely babble the secrets intrusted to them so long ago, and which so few persons since have cared to entertain. In these " powerful rhymes" the dazzling young Earl outlives "the gilded monuments of princes," his favored image 66 Shining more bright in these contents, Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time." Truly did his immortalizer assure him, "'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room, That wear this world out to the ending doom." Rowland Whyte, in his letters to Sir Robert Sidney in 1599 and 1600, when Herbert was in his nineteenth and twentieth years, says in reference to him, at one time, "It is laid to his charge that he is a melancholy young man." At another time, speaking of the accomplishments he is practising, the uncle's correspondent writes of him that "he dances, he sings." Shakespeare begins one of his Sonnets to him with the words, "Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?" Whyte also writes, that he does "not find any disposition at all in this gallant young lord to marry." And the Sonnets combat this disinclination and their object, urging him, with many arguments, to wed and transmit his person. The friend's charm of person is first celebrated, with astonishing variety of imagery, but in one tone of earnest sincerity. Time is conjured, 66 "O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow, For beauty's pattern to succeeding men." "A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted, A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes, but women's souls amazeth." |