rightly described that on page 11 as "the most exquisite of his sonnets for sweet colour and winning fancy."

Page 15. "There is, after all, nothing more remarkable or fascinating in English poetry than these personal revelations of the mind of our greatest poet. We read them again and again, and find each time some new proof of his almost superhuman insight into human nature; of his ununrivalled mastery over all the tones of love."-F. T. PALGRAVE.

"The student of Shakspere is drawn to the sonnets not alone by their ardour and depth of feeling, their fertility and condensation of thought, their exquisite felicities of phrase, and their frequent beauty of rhythmical movement, but in a peculiar degree by the possibility that here, if nowhere else, the greatest of English poets may-as Wordsworth puts it-have unlocked his heart."--E. DowDEN.

These two paragraphs clearly represent the almost unanimous opinion of the present generation respecting Shakespeare's sonnets, and one reads with astonishment the wondrous criticism of George Steevens to the effect that Thomas Watson was "a more elegant sonneteer than

Shakespeare." Watson was a contemporary of the great dramatist, and the following may be given as a rather favourable specimen of his work :

I saw the object of my pining thought
Within a garden of sweet Nature's placing;
Wherein an arbour artificial wrought,

By workman's wondrous skill the garden gracing,
Did boast his glory, glory far renowned,
For in his shady boughs my mistress slept;
And with a garland of his branches crowned,
Her dainty forehead from the Sun he kept
Imperious Love upon her eyelids tending,
Playing his wanton sports at every beck,
And into every finest limb descending,
From eyes to lips, from lips to ivory neck;
And every limb supplied, and t'every part

Had free access, but durst not touch her heart.

Page 28. Nothing could be more charming, or sweetertoned, than this sonnet on Content, and the one entitled The Talent is but little inferior. It is surprising to find both Constable and Barnes omitted from Leigh Hunt's Book of the Sonnet, while Mr. John Dennis, in the Notes to his selection, states that he has been unable to find one sonnet, out of the large number written by Barnes, that is adapted to his collection." If, as Dr. Grosart

-

states, Ah, Sweet Content might for its "sweet, soft simpleness," have formed part of the Arcadia, the quaint solemn beauty of The Talent might have added another leaf to the wreaths that encircle the brows of Donne and

George Herbert, It may be mentioned that Barnes was born in the county of York about the year 1568, and was the younger son of Dr. Barnes, Bishop of Durham: he was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and subsequently accompanied the Earl of Essex into France. Those subscribers who have the good fortune of possessing copies of Dr. Grosart's excellent reprint of Barnes' poems are much to be congratulated.

Page 31. Drummond of Hawthornden, has been designated, and rightly, "the Scottish Petrarch" : with the exception of Shakespeare he is the most important sonneteer before Milton, and his compositions are both melodious and picturesque. One of the most remarkable of his sonnets is that on Mary Magdalen, which for striking and bold originality, for freshness of thought and expression, for delicious imagery and tender pathos, may compare favourably with our best English sonnets. It should be mentioned that his well-known sonnet beginning

Q

"Alexis, here she stayed," is addressed to William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, who was himself a poet, and has the honour (so far as is known) of having written the first Dialogue sonnet in English, which is here given for that reason:

A.

What art thou, in such sort that wail'st thy fall,
And comes surcharged with an excessive grief?

H.

A woeful wretch, that comes to crave relief,
And was his heart that now hath none at all.

A.

Why dost thou thus to me unfold thy state,
As if with thy mishaps I would embroil me?

H.

Because the love I bare to you did spoil me,
And was the instrument of my hard fate :-

A.

And dare so base a wretch so high aspire,

As for to plead for interest in my grace?
Go, get thee hence! Or if thou dost not cease
I vow to burn thee with a greater fire.

H.

Ah, ah,-this great unkindness stops my breath,
Since those that I love best procure my death.

1604.

Page 40. It may possibly be urged by those who are not conversant with the history of the Sonnet that these two examples by Robert Herrick are not sonnets at all. Such objectors may well be referred to a short paper by no less an authority than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entitled "What is a Sonnet?" which they will find in Blackwood's "Edinburgh Magazine," for June, 1832. The form used by Herrick is as legitimate as that in which Shakespeare's sonnets are written, and it is that adopted by Thomas Carew in his sonnet Love's Force, by Edmund Waller, by Cotton, and more especially by William Habington, the most productive sonneteer of Herrick's contemporaries, whose well-known collection of poems, Castara, is mainly composed of sonnets written in this form. The following may be quoted as a representative example of Habington's style :

Where sleeps the north-wind when the south inspires
Life in the spring, and gathers into quires

The scattered nightingales; whose subtle ears
Heard first the harmonious language of the spheres ;
Whence hath the stone magnetic force to allure
The enamoured iron; from a seed impure
Or natural did first the mandrake grow;

What power i' th' ocean makes it ebb and flow;