the author of the Shakespeare play, and handles them in metaphor with the same ease and certainty.1 The notable examples of this occur in the second part and the posthumous cantos :—

Book IV. xii. 31.-The legal case in the Marinell and Florimell episode; see Chapter III., and p. 505 below. Book VI. vii.-The punishment of Mirabella :

Fayre Mirabella was her name, whereby
Of all those crymes she there indited was :
All which when Cupid heard, he by and by
In great displeasure wild a Capias
Should issue forth t' attach that scornefull lasse.
The warrant straight was made, and therewithall
A Baylieffe-errant forth in post did passe,
Whom they by name there Portamore did call ;
He which doth summon lovers to loves judgement hall.

The damzell was attacht, and shortly brought
Unto the barre whereas she was arrayned;
But she thereto nould plead, nor answere ought,
Even for stubborne pride which her restrayned.
So judgement past, as is by law ordayned
In cases like; which when at last she saw,
Her stubborne hart, which love before disdayned,
Gan stoupe; and, falling downe with humble awe,
Cryde mercie, to abate the extremitie of law.

(35, 36.)

In the same book, Canto iv., the lady, to whom Sir Calepine delivers the babe he has rescued from a bear, accepts it

as of her owne by liverey and seisin. (37.)

The trial scene in the second of the "Mutabilitie cantos, stanzas 13-17.

The use, in several places, of the word "tortious."

1 Compare, for instance, such a use of legal metaphor by Shakespeare as that in Romeo's death-speech :

. . and lips, O you

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death !”

and in Love's Labour's Lost, where a girl, refusing a kiss, is made to say, "My lips are no common, though several they be" (ii. 1). With the first of these compare the use of the same metaphor in the "Astrophel and Stella " sonnets (85): "Let lips Love's indentures make."

The writer's impartiality and habit of writing on both sides of a question, to which I have alluded in other places, is well illustrated in his practice of introducing the figure of the Queen, or a touch suggestive of her, in passages of censure as well as praise. Thus in the "House of Pride" (I. iv.) the false pomp and vices of the Court, or of Court life generally, are clearly alluded to, the Queen of it being described as "a mayden Queene" (8). Compare the description of Philotimè in the "House of Mammon" (II. vii. 48), and the bold expression "that goodly Idoll" in Sonnet 27. The bad side of the Court (though not of the Queen) is similarly described in Colin Clout in a passage following the eulogies.

Perhaps no better example could be found of the similarity of the treatment of love by Spenser and Shakespeare than the description of the effect of it in absence. Compare the account of Britomart's restlessness in the absence of Arthegal, and the way in which she assails Talus on his return with a string of questions:

And where is he thy Lord, and how far hence?
Declare at once: and hath he lost or wun?

(F.Q. V. vi. 9)

with Rosalind's speech about Orlando, of course in a lighter vein, in As you like it (iii. 2):

What said he? How makes he here? Did How parted he with thee? Answer me in one word. Antony:

What did he when thou sawest him? looked he? Wherein went he? What he ask for me? Where remains he? and when shalt thou see him again? and with Cleopatra's speech about

O Charmian,
Stands he, or sits he?

Where think'st thou he is now?
Or does he walk, or is he on a horse?

(i. 5.)

And compare again with these the "Astrophel and Stella" sonnet (92):

I would know whether she did sit or walk;

How cloth'd; how waited on; sigh'd she, or smil'd;
Whereof, with whom, how often did she talk . . .

We have here reached a point when the necessary facts have been stated for the consideration of the identity of "Rosalind," which I endeavoured to show, at the end of Chapter XIII., must carry with it the identity of "Stella" of the Sidney sonnets. The solution which I have to offer, or, rather, which offers itself, when once the identity of the author of these works is recognised, lies in the indications given by "E. K." in the "Glosse" to the Shepheards Calender. From him we learn that she was "a Gentlewoman of no meane house, nor endewed with anye vulgare and common giftes, both of nature and manners" (April), and that "Rosalinde is also a feigned name, which, being well ordered, will bewray the very name of his loue and mistresse, whom by that name he coloureth" (January). The obvious solution of this anagram is "Mary Sidney," which gives all the essential letters (R sa inde). This must have occurred to many people, but the circumstances of Edmund Spenser have seemed to render it inadmissible.

But it is most natural Bacon. The date of 1561 has been given,

in the circumstances of Francis
Mary Sidney's birth is not known;
but the date suggested in the Dictionary of National
Biography is 1555. She was therefore some years
older than Bacon, and it would be in consonance with
experience in cases of precocious mental development
that he should have been attracted in youth by a woman
older than himself, especially if she had superior gifts of
mind. The hints given by "Laneham" in 1575, under
the disguise of absurdity, support this conclusion (see
p. 277 above). Under it, also, the allusion in the third
sonnet of Shakespeare (on the supposition that those
sonnets were addressed to William Herbert, the Countess
of Pembroke's eldest son) falls into its natural place :

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

The player could hardly have even seen the Countess until she was between thirty and forty, and the sense of tender recollection which these lines convey is unaccount

able in his case. The writer seems to see the image of his early love in the son, and this would largely account for the abnormal warmth of address, the note of regret, and the sense of frustrated parental instinct which render these sonnets so enigmatical. The curious allusion to "Immerito" and a certain lady under the name of "Rosalinde "in one of the Harvey letters published in 15801 also finds a perfectly natural meaning, and one which is in consonance with Bacon's circumstances in 1578-79, and his habit of self-idealisation :

Imagin me to come into a goodly Kentishe Garden of your old Lords, or some other Nobleman, and spying a florishing Bay Tree there, to demaunde ex tempore, as followeth :

Arbor vittoriosa, triomfale,

Onor d'Imperadori, e di Poete:

and perhappes it will advaunce the winges of your Imagination a degree higher at the least if any thing can be added to the loftinesse of his conceite, whom gentle Mistresse Rosalinde once reported to haue all the Intelligences at commaundement, and an other time, Christened her Segnior Pegaso.

Mary Sidney was married to the Earl of Pembroke in 1577, when Francis Bacon was abroad. The marriage was arranged by her uncle, the Earl of Leicester, with the willing approval of her father. The Earl was a widower and some twenty years her senior. There is evidence of disagreement in later years, and by his will Pembroke left his wife "as bare as he could." 2 There was, therefore, a parallelism in the circumstances of Mary Sidney and Penelope Devereux, and I conceive that the writer of the Astrophel and Stella" sonnets took advantage of this to express his own feelings under a disguise which was sufficiently applicable for the purpose to another case. When these sonnets appeared there was no one left to represent Sir Philip Sidney except his brother Robert, who was abroad, and the Countess of

"A Gallant familiar Letter containing an Answere to that of M. Immerto," in Three proper and wittie familiar letters, etc.

2 Chamberlain, Letters, temp. Eliz., p. 100; cited in Dict. Nat. Biogr.

Pembroke, whose feelings of resentment on her brother's account would, so far as she entertained them, be mitigated by a tribute so flattering to her as a woman, especially if it was associated with tender or happier memories. The only serious risk, therefore, lay in the resentment of Lord Rich; but he was estranged from his wife, and the author therefore had little to fear.

The existence of such an understanding would also account for the large additions made in the name of the Countess of Pembroke to the volume of the Arcadia after 1590, of which the fine sonnet placed in the front of this work is an example. It might also account, to some extent, for the fact that Bacon did not marry until he was forty-five, and then, apparently, for money. It points also to the authorship of the famous epitaph, written by an unknown hand, after the death of the Countess in 1621. It may explain, too, certain lines in the sonnet addressed to her, among those before the Faerie Queene, which I am quite unable to construe, except in terms of Spenser's intentional ambiguity:

Who [i.e. Sidney] first my Muse did lift out of the flore,
To sing his sweet delights in lowlie laies ;

For his, and for your owne especial sake,

Vouchsafe from him this token in good worth to take.

It is noteworthy, in this connection, that among the ladies praised in Colin Clout the Countess of Pembroke, under the name of "Urania," is given the first place after the Queen; and in Astrophel she is described as "The gentlest shepherdesse that lives this day."

1 "Underneath this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse,

Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," etc.

I do not agree with those who reject the second stanza on the ground of inferiority. It seems to me necessary for the balance of the rhythm, which rises again on the first line of the second stanza,

"Marble piles let no man raise

To her name . . ."

and then falls quietly (in artificial language common in inscriptions) to a close.