Thorpe's Collection. Curll's, in 1710, follows that of Cotes. Gildon gave it as his opinion, that the sonnets were all of them written in praise of Shakspeare's mistress. Dr. Sewell edited them in 1728, and he tells us, by way of illustrating Gildon's idea, that a young Muse must have a Mistress to play off the beginnings of fancy; nothing being so apt to elevate the soul to a pitch of poetry, as the passion of love.' This opinion, that the sonnets were addressed to a mistress, appears to have obtained, until disputed by Steevens and Malone. In 1780, the lastnamed critic published his 'Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare's Plays,' (1778) and the notes to the sonnets include his own conjectures and conclusions, together with those of Dr. Farmer, Tyrwhitt, and Steevens. These four generally concur in the belief that 128 of the sonnets are addressed to a man; the remaining 28 to a lady. Malone considered the sonnets to be those spoken of by Meres. Dr. Farmer thought that William Harte, Shakspeare's nephew, might be the person addressed under the initials W. H.' However, the Stratford Register soon put a stop to William Harte's candidature, for it showed that he was not baptised until August 28, 1600. Tyrwhitt was struck with the peculiar lettering of a line in the 20th sonnet, A man in Hew all Hews in his controlling, and fancied that the poet had written it on the colorable pretext of hinting at the 'only begetter's' name, which the critic conjectured might be William Hughes. The sonnets were Steevens' pet abhorrence. At first he did not reprint them. He says, 'We have not reprinted the sonnets, &c. of Shakspeare because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service, notwithstanding these miscellaneous poems have derived every possible advantage from the literature and judgment of their only intelligent STEEVENS' CENSURE. 5 editor, Mr. Malone, whose implements of criticism, like the ivory rake and golden spade in Prudentius, are, on this occasion, disgraced by the objects of their culture. Had Shakspeare produced no other works than these, his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred on that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonnetteer.' Afterwards he broke out continually in abuse of them. The eruption. of his ill humour occurs in foot-notes, and disfigures the pages of Malone's edition of Shakspeare's poems. He held that they were composed in the highest strain of affectation, pedantry, circumlocution, and nonsense.' 'Such laboured perplexities of language,' he says, and such studied deformities of style prevail throughout these sonnets, that the reader (after our best endeavours at explanation!) will frequently find reason to exclaim with Imogen I see before me, man, nor here, nor there, "This purblind and obscure stuff,' he calls their poetry. And in a note to sonnet 54 he asks with a sneer, ‘but what has truth or nature to do with sonnets?' Here he has taken the poet to task for his bad botany. Shakspeare has written The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye As the perfumed tincture of the roses. 6 Steevens remarks that Shakspeare had not yet begun to observe the productions of nature with accuracy, or his eyes would have convinced him that the cynorhodon is by no means of as deep a colour as the rose!' What rose? The poet does not say a damask rose, nor a rose of any red. The pink hedge rose may be of as deep a dye as the maiden-blush, and other garden roses. The comparison in colour is only relative, the remark on that side merely general, it is the fragrance of the rose in which the positive part of the comparison will be found. The meaning is this; the hedge-roses may be of as deep a dye or lovely a colour as their garden fellows in hue, but even then they are not so precious in perfume, and are not used for the purpose of distilling. Shakspeare knew a dog-rose from the damask-rose; no flower more familiar to him in his rambles along the Warwickshire lanes. He has carried into his illustrations drawn from it all the aversion which children have to the cankers' that infect this wayside flower.2 But Steevens had no patience with these poems; he wrote some sad stuff about the sonnets, and scoffed at them in the most profane and graceless way. He never read them, never penetrated to the depths of feeling that underlie the sparkling surface. The conceits, that play of fancy, which is a sort of more serious wit, came on him too suddenly with their surprises. He was too slow for them, and they fooled him and laughed in his face. And when he did catch the sense of the (to him) nonsense, he took his revenge by decrying the impertinent jingle of sense and sound that had so playfully tried to tickle his obtuse spirit, and only succeeded in making him savage. Wordsworth, in his essay supplementary to the celebrated 1 I had rather be a canker in a hedge. Than a rose in his grace.-Much Ado about Nothing. 2 This recalls another peevish and petulant remark of Steevens, in making which, he snapped too soon for his limited amount of perception. Shakspeare, in the 'Passionate Pilgrim,' number 10, writes 'As faded gloss no rubbing will refresh.' Steevens catches at this, and replies: "Every one knows that the gloss or polish on all works of art may be restored, and that rubbing is the means of restoring it.' Indeed! Did the critic ever test his theory on an old hat? It would not be advisable even to try it in burnishing the faded gilding of picture-frames and mirrors. Shakspeare used 'gloss in the sense of gilding. WORDSWORTH — COLERIDGE-CHALMERS. 7 preface, printed with the Lyrical Ballads, has administered a just rebuke to Steevens, and reprehended his flippant impertinence. He says, There is extant a small volume of miscellaneous poems, in which Shakspeare expresses his own feelings in his own person. It is not difficult to conceive that the editor, George Steevens, should have been insensible to the beauties of one portion of that volume, the sonnets; though in no part of the writings of this poet is found in an equal compass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed. But from a regard to the critic's own credit he would not have ventured to talk of an Act of Parliament not being strong enough to compel the perusal of these little pieces, if he had not known that the people of England were ignorant of the treasures contained in them; and if he had not, moreover, shared the too common propensity of human nature to exult over a supposed fall into the mire of a genius whom he had been compelled to regard with admiration, as an inmate of the celestial regions, there sitting where he durst not soar.' 6 This was written by Wordsworth in 1815; he had read the sonnets for their poetry, independently of their object, and had thus got a little nearer to the spirit of Shakspeare, behind its veil of mystery, and attained to a truer appreciation of his sonnets. About the same time Coleridge lectured on Shakspeare at the Royal Institution, and publicly rebuked the obtuse sense and shallow expressions of Steevens. In 1797 Chalmers had endeavoured to show that the sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth, although Her Majesty must have been close upon sixty years of age when the sonnets were first commenced. He argues that Shakspeare, knowing the voracity of Elizabeth for praise, thought he would fool her to the top of her bent; aware of her patience when listening to panegyric, he determined, with the resolution of his own Dogberry, to bestow his whole tediousness upon her. It may be mentioned by way of explanation that this preposterous suggestion was hazarded in support of a very desperate case—the Ireland forgeries. Coleridge also held, though on a far sounder basis, that the person addressed by Shakspeare was a woman. He fancied the 20th sonnet might have been introduced as a blind. He felt that in so many of the sonnets the spirit was essentially feminine whatever the outward figure might be, sufficiently so to warrant our thinking that where the address is to a man it was only a disguise; for, whilst the expression would indicate one sex, the feeling altogether belied it, and secretly wooed or worshipped the other. Poet-like, he perceived that there were such fragrant gusts of passion in them, such subtle-shining secresies' of meaning in their darkness, as only a woman could have called forth; and so many of the sonnets have the suggestive sweetness of the lover's whispered words, the ecstatic sparkle of a lover's eyes, the tender, ineffable touch of a lover's hands, that in them it must be a man speaking to a woman. Mr. Knight believes that such sonnets as 56, 57, and 58, and also the perfect love-poem contained in sonnets 97, 98, and 99 were addressed to a female, because the comparisons are so clearly, so exquisitely the symbol of womanly beauty, so exclusively the poetic representatives of feminine graces in the world of flowers, and because, in the sonnets where Shakspeare directly addresses his male friend, it is manly beauty which he extols. He says nothing to lead us to think that he would seek to compliment his friend on the delicate whiteness of his hand, the surpassing sweetness of his breath. Mr. Knight has found the perplexities of the personal theory so insurmountable, that he has not followed in the steps of those who have jauntily overleaped the difficulties that meet us everywhere, and which ought, until fairly conquered, to have surrounded and protected the poet's personal |