call "Fortune's dearest spite?" Was there no place but Stratford where the prosperous poet could buy himself lands, and write himself gentleman ? Had London and "The Mermaid," with Raleigh, and Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and all the rest of them, no attractions? As to the story of his flight from Stratford a disgraced man, there is not a tittle of evidence in its support; unless you think Walter Savage Landor, and his inimitable trial scene, good contemporary authority. Critics have been deceived with less excuse.

HARDEN.-Well! Well! I'll grant you, he never sneered at the Shallows, or made sport of "the dozen white louses" which so became the Knight of Charlecote's old coat! There are no Dogberrys in his plays! It is all a much-ado-about-nothing, this talk of youthful escapades. He loved a Justice, as Falstaff would have certified, better than "a Windsor stag, the fattest in the Forest."

DELINA.-Nay, but let us consider it seriously. Can you produce nothing more to the point than what you have yet advanced? If you are to credit Shakespeare with all the sentiments of his dramatic characters, you will indeed make him "not one, but all mankind's epitome." What say you to his Katherine, in Henry VIII.? If she and the bluff Tudor were 66 misgraffed in respect of years," the poet went out of his way as a courtier at least,-when he made of her a model wife.

HARDEN. You go wide afield, indeed, if Harry the Eighth is your model husband. But I still venture to think I have already advanced some pretty apt passages. Can you match them with one in support of your view from Henry VIII., or that other pattern husband, Othello, or Crookback Richard, or Hamlet's uncle, or Benedict himself? Let us have it, no matter where you cull it from.

DELINA.-I grant you, the demand is a hard one. Gladly would we recover, if we

could, some clue to the personal history of this, the greatest of poets, and as I believe, the greatest of men. But his very dramatic power arises from the objective character of his mind. His was, moreover, too healthy and masculine a nature for morbid introversions of the Byronic type. But if anywhere an autobiographic glimpse is to be looked. for, it is in his "sugared sonnets,"—as Meres calls them,-some of which were doubtless among the earliest productions of his muse.

HARDEN. When you can make any sense out of that incomprehensible riddle with which some wiseacre introduced his sonnets to the world; and tell us who "The onlie Begetter of these insuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H." is, to whom "The well-wishing Adventurer in setting forth, T. T., wisheth that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet:" it will be time enough to solve the remainder of the mystical puzzle. But what of the Sonnets? I thought the critics were pretty well agreed that the "Laura" of our Petrarchian sonneteer was one of the rougher sex. I have looked into them sufficiently carefully, myself, to know that Anne Hathaway's name is not to be found in the whole hundred and fifty-four. DELINA. away may be. Sonnet :

Perhaps not. Yet Anne Hath-
Wordsworth says of the

"With this key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart." HARDEN. And you still persuade yourself Anne had a place there?

DELINA. I am more certain she had a place in Shakespeare's heart than in his Sonnets; for they resemble in their general character, other well-known collections of the time, by Daniel, Constable, Spenser and Drayton; and were, as Meres tells us, first circulated in manuscript among his private friends. Too much has been attempted to be made out of them. Some undoubtedly express the poet's own feelings. deal with fanciful loves and jealousies; or

Others

dwell on the personal experiences of friends. But there, if anywhere, we have some insight into the inner life of the poet. You know the fine one where he chides Fortune: "That did not better for my life provide,

Than public means, which public manners breed." Petrarchian Sonnets, I am well aware, are sufficiently intangible things. I have tried to extract autobiographical material out of those of Wyatt and Surrey, as well as of Spenser and know it to be something like getting sunbeams out of cucumbers! Still some of the Sonnets of Shakespeare immediately succeeding that lament over his banishment from the favourite haunts of his boyhood's and lover's days, seem to me to acquire a fine significance as addressed to

his absent wife :

"Alas! why, fearing of Time's tyranny,

Might I not then say, ' Now I love you best,'
When I was certain o'er incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?
Love is a babe; then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow?"

Fancy the young husband dwelling, in his absence, on the one disparity between them, of which officious friends would not fail to make the most, and so writing :

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."

-

HARDEN. You are ingenious, I own; but you will admit that a score of other applications could be, and indeed have already been made to appear equally apt.

DELINA.—I am well aware of the perplexity the Sonnets have occasioned to critic and biographer; and of the fashion in which some have dogmatized about them. Chalmers had no doubt they were addressed to the maiden Queen! Dr. Gervinus, of Heidelberg, is not less certain that they are all, without exception addressed to Mr. W. H. This indeed he pronounces to be "quite indubitable"; only he thinks Mr. W. H. was

not Mr. W. H., but a mystification for the Earl of Southampton—an idea of old date. Tyrwhitt, Farmer, Steevens, Malone, and others of the antiquarian type, only differ as to who the man was on whom Shakespeare expended all this amatory verse; while Mr. Armitage Brown thinks they are not sonnets at all, but stanzas of some half dozen continuous poems to a friend and a mistress. Shakespeare had a nephew, William Hart, the son of his sister Joan. He had a patron William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom his literary executors dedicated his dramatic works, as one to whom their author owed much favour while living. There was a William Hughes in Shakespeare's time; and one of the Dr. Dryasdusts-Tyrwhitt, I think,-made the grand discovery of his name in the twentieth sonnet, disguised under a pun bad enough to have been the death of old Sam. Johnson:

"A man in hue all Hews in his controlling!"

Dr. Drake, another of the wiseacres, finds that Lord Southampton's name was Henry Wriothsley.-H. W., if not W. H.-and so thinks he has found the mystical initials of the dedication; only reversed for the purpose of concealment ; and so we get back to the idea fathered so unhesitatingly by the Heidelberg Professor, and are no wiser than when we set out.

HARDEN.-Truly it is rather a narrow foundation to build a hypothesis upon; as Lovel said when called in as umpire in the famous Pictish controversy at Monkbarns.

DELINA. Not a whit, not a whit, say I, with the redoubted Oldbuck; men fight best in a narrow ring; and any one may see as far as his neighbour through a millstone,

provided only it has a hole in the middle! HARDEN.-Pray then what do you believe about these same Sonnets and their only begetter? Steevens has pronounced them to be too bad for even the genius of their author to make tolerable; beyond even the power of an Act of Parliament

to enforce their perusal ! Wordsworth says of the very same Sonnets that in no part of Shakespeare's writings is there to be found, in an equal compass, a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed. Who shall decide when doctors disagree?

DELINA.-Between two such doctors the choice is not difficult, I should think; and as to their interpretation, why should the Sonnets be judged by a different rule from those of Petrarch and Surrey, of Spenser or Drayton. Meres, who knew of them while still in private circulation, before 1598, in his "Wits' Treasury" calls them "Shakespeare's sugared sonnets among his private friends." That is simple enough. To him with all his knowledge of the man and the period, they were just such detached sonnets, written from time to time under varying emotions and external influences, as those in Spenser's Amoretti, in Daniel's "Delia," or in the "Idea's Mirror" of Drayton. Many of them were written in those earlier years in which he penned his "Venus and Adonis," and other lyrical pieces, before he discovered where his true strength lay. But long afterwards I doubt not he found in many a thoughtful mood:

"'Twas pastime to be bound

Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground." until at length the whole were collected and printed by Thomas Thorpe,-the T. T. of the involved dedication,-so late as 1609.

HARDEN. So far, I am very much of your mind. But who then was Mr. W. H.? Have you found in him the father of Anne Shakespeare, and so the only begetter of her and the sonnets too? A William Hathaway would be a match for any W. H. yet named. DELINA. I do not greatly concern myself about Mr. W. H. He certainly was not the poet's father-in-law; for his name was Richard. "Mr." in those days implied a University graduate what if the said Mr. W. H.-to whom, be it remembered, the publisher, and not the author, makes his

quaint dedication,--was no more than some amateur collector, who had earned the gratitude of Thomas Thorpe, by augmenting Jaggard's meagre collection of "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke," printed ten years before? Printers and publishers in those old days troubled themselves as little about an author's right to property in his own brainwork, as any Harper or Harpy of the free and enlightened Republic of this nineteenth century. Initials are common on their titlepages. Mr. I. H. prints one edition of the "Venus and Adonis," Mr. R. F. another, Mr. W. B. a third, and Mr. T. P. a fourth. One edition of the "Lucrece" bears the initials I. H., another N.O., a third T. S., and a fourth J. B. Sometimes the mystery lies with the printer, at other times with the publisher. The sonnets of 1609 are "By G. Eld, for T. T., and are to be sold by William Aspley." Why should not the dedication have its share. Everybody who cared to know, could find out who I. H. the printer, or T. T. the publisher was; and probably Mr. W. H. was then no more important, and little less accessible.

HARDEN,-It may be so; and this Will o' the Wisp has led us a round, much akin to that of the old bibliomaniacs you refuse to follow:

'Through bog, through bush, through brake,
through briar."

What of your promised glimpse of Anne
Hathaway in these same sonnet-riddles ?

DELINA. Reading them with the idea of an absent husband responding to the regrets of one who deplores that time has her already at a disadvantage, I find a significance cast on many that were before as obscure, though not as barren, to me as they proved to the critical lawyer, George Steevens. Look for example, at the beautiful one beginning: "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;" and yet he comforts himself that his verse shall live to praise her worth, despite Time's