the whole lament will see that two different persons must be intended. The sequence of thought is this: The first of the three stanzas laments that Willy is dead; the second, that scoffing scurrility and scornful folly have occupied the stage in his stead; the third approves the conduct of a living and producing writer in abstaining from co-operation with base-born play-wrights. If we suppose "that same gentle spirit" to refer back to our pleasant Willy, and not forward to the next line, we land ourselves in a contradiction whether we regard Willy's death as literal or metaphorical, because this gentle spirit is both really and poetically alive-large streams of honey and ́nectar are flowing from him. I believe that in the third stanza Thalia refers to Spenser himself, and that here we have his justification of himself for complaining of the withdrawal of learning from the stage, and yet sending no compositions of his own to prop it up. Some such justification was certainly required: Spenser could hardly have asked why learning had forsaken the stage, without giving a reason for withholding contributions from his own copious pen. The vanity of the excuse will not surprise any one who knows what he makes Hobinol and others say concerning Colin Clout. 371 APPENDIX B. AN UNRECOGNISED SONNET BY SHAKESPEARE? IN the Elizabethan age of our literature, when there were neither dailies, weeklies, monthlies, nor quarterlies in which it might be possible to express a friendly partiality for a new book, it was a common mark of friendship to send to an author a set of eulogistic verses, to be printed at the beginning of his book as a guarantee of its worth. In those days very few books were published without one or more such introductory poems of commendation. It was, perhaps, inevitable that this peculiar form of literature should, even in the rich Elizabethan age, be remarkable chiefly for poverty of invention; the circle of ideas for these commendations is almost necessarily limited. We find in great plenty such verses as the following : or or He that shall read thy characters, Nic. Breton, And weigh them well, must say they are well written ; Who reads this book with a judicious eye, Read with regard what here with due regard Such is the commonplace commendatory poem; and the friendly eulogiums of the greatest masters, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, or Ford, rise very little, if at all, above the level. Most of them are of the three-piled hyperbolical order-containing loud assertions of merit with loud defiance of contradiction, and playing if possible upon the name of the piece or of the author. Even Chapman's ingenuity could devise nothing better than the following lines in a eulogium on Ben Jonson's "Volpone, or The Fox : " Come yet more forth, Volpone, and thy chase Perform to all length, for thy breath will serve thee; The usurer shall never wear thy case, Men do not hunt to kill but to preserve thee. A very fair impression of the general character of commendatory verses may be got from the following set composed by Henry Upcher for Greene's "Menaphon": in cleverness and prettiness this is distinctly above the average :— Delicious words, the life of wanton wit, That doth inspire our souls with sweet content, And twenty Floras in their golden guise; As this whose garnish'd gleads, compar'd, devise. Whose labouring beauty branch'd itself abroad; And greener objects are mine eyes abroad. No country to the downs of Arcadie, Where Aganippe's ever-springing wells Do moist the meads with bubbling melody, And makes me muse what more in Delos dwells. Foretells he'll ne'er come chaunt of Thoae's sport. Robin, thou hast done well, care not who grudge. It has been remarked that Shakespeare is not known to have contributed any such expression of goodwill to the works of any of his friends, and the reason has been supposed to be that he shrank from the suspicion of hollowness and insincerity to which the practice had become liable. But I am half inclined to believe that I have fallen upon an exception to this rule, made, in fact, before the rule was formed, a few years after Shakespeare's arrival in London. There is a sonnet prefixed to John Florio's 'Second Fruits,' published in the spring of 1591, which is not without certain marks of Shakespearian parentage. Second Fruits' is not, perhaps, prima facie, a book where one would naturally expect to find a recommendation by Shakespeare; being nothing but a book of dialogues and aphorisms, printed in parallel columns of English and Italian, to help those speaking the one language to acquire a knowledge of the other. But those who remember the interest then taken in the Italian language, the probability that Shakespeare shared that interest, and the fact that both Shakespeare and Florio, who was a famed teacher of Italian, were protégés of the young Earl of Southampton, will not be inclined to deny the authorship on external probabilities, if the sonnet seems otherwise worthy of so distinguished an origin. It runs as follows, the compliment turning upon the title "Fruits," the name Florio, and the season of publication: PHAETON TO HIS FRIEND FLORIO. Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase, For when each branch hath left his flourishing, And spends her franchise on each living thing: (Except the Laurel that is ever green), The concluding couplet is bald, apparently from the necessity that the author was under of returning from his description of the seasons to the dry reality in hand; but otherwise, those familiar with the commendatory verses of the period will recognise at once its superiority to commonplace. Excepting always the splendid sonnet signed "W. R.," prefixed to the second issue of Spenser's 'Faery Queen,' which is so good that it is hard to resist a conviction that it is Spenser's own, one might safely challenge all detractors to produce half-a-dozen better commendatory poems from the works of that generation. Whereas most others strike us as making desperate efforts to find something to say, Phaeton seems to hit easily upon a fresh and fruitful idea. He is hyperbolical, of course, in his praise, but his hyperbole is not three-piled; on the contrary, there is a peculiar earnestness and simplicity in his tone. This is all the more noticeable because the main idea would seem to have been suggested by one of the sonnets of Petrarch, which professes to have been sent with a present of flowers in the spring. There is no imitation beyond the borrowing of the main thought: Phaeton follows it out in his own way. It is no exaggeration to say that almost any other panegyrist in that age would have played upon the words "Florio " and "Fruits from beginning to end of the sonnet. Nothing is more distinctive of Shakespeare than the intense earnestness of his descriptions of the coming on of Winter and of Night, corresponding naturally to the genuine ecstasy of his descriptions of Spring and of Morning. This is no idolatrous fancy about Shakespeare, but a conclusion that is irresistible when we place his descriptions side by side with the descriptions of his contemporaries. It is not easy to analyse the peculiarities of expression that produce this effect in terms impervious to cavil; but one may venture to say that in their descriptions of Winter and Spring, or of the allied seasons, Night and Morning, his contemporaries are quainter, or more diffuse, or more frivolous, or more conventional, than he is. Shakespeare does use the conventional classical personifications in his less serious moods; but much more habitually than his contemporaries he personifies the powers of Nature directly for himself. Thus where Spenser has At last fair Hesperus in highest sky Had spent his lamp and brought forth dawning light, Shakespeare has Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund Day Where Spenser has— The joyous day 'gan early to appear, With rosy cheeks, for shame as blushing red, Shakespeare has the incomparable lines And sullen Night with slow sad steps descended Take, again, Drayton's description of the morning twilight Now ere the purple dawning yet did spring, This is very sweet and pretty, but it wants the glowing earnestness of Shakespeare's description of a somewhat later moment Lo! now the gentle lark, weary of rest, And wakes the Morning, from whose silver breast Who doth the world so gloriously behold That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. In all Shakespeare's descriptions we are conscious of a deep and vivid sense of the pains of darkness and barrenness, and the pleasures of relief from them. And in the sonnet of Phaeton's, though the occasion did not call for the deepest feeling, and though the expression is not so uniformly mature, we are conscious of the same genuine earnestness. Phaeton also personifies directly, and gives to his personification of Spring a fuller and less conventional life than we have seen in any other Elizabethan poet. The reader will best understand our argument by comparing Phaeton's treatment of the Seasons with the following passages from Drayton :— As when fair Ver, dight in her flowery rail, |