nothing, however, to the feats of which Mr. Massey's subtlety is
capable. Sonnet 38 begins:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?

That is, kindly explains Mr. Massey--lest we should be tempted to accept
the obvious meaning of the lines, that the poet could not want a
subject while his friend lived, whose worth was too great for every
ordinary writing to celebrate fitly--"that is, the new subject of the
earl's suggesting and the new form of the earl's inventing are too
choice to be committed to _common paper_; which means that Shakespeare
had until then written his personal sonnets on slips of paper provided
by himself, and now the excelling argument of the earl's love is to be
written in Southampton's own book"! Perhaps it means that Shakespeare
had taken to gilt-edged, hot-pressed, double-scented Bath note.

Mr. Massey's ingenuity in getting over a difficulty is as great as his
faculty of construction. Having assumed Lady Rich (that Stella whose
golden hair makes half the glory of Sidney's verse) to be the "black
beauty" of the Sonnets, he finds that Sonnet 130 perversely says, "If
hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head"--a bit of evidence that
would seem to upset this theory. But Mr. Massey is not to be put down so
easily. This is ironical, he says in effect; Shakespeare did not mean
this; "it is a bit of malicious subtlety to call the lady's hair black
wires, which was so often besung as golden hair; and _she had been so
vain of its mellow splendor!_ ... And there is the '_if_' to be
considered--'much virtue in an _if'!_--'_If_ hairs be wires,' says the
speaker, 'black wires grow on her head!' So that the 'black' is only
used conditionally, and the fact remains that 'hairs' are _not_
'wires.'" If we are to interpret Shakespeare in this manner, where is
such foolery to cease?

To sum up the principal facts of Mr. Massey's elaborate theory in a few
words, we find that he considers the Sonnets to be dedicated to William
Herbert, earl of Pembroke, as "their only begetter" (or obtainer) for
the publisher, Mr. Thomas Thorpe; that they consist properly of two
series, the first written for Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton,
the second for the earl of Pembroke; that they begin with the poet's
advice to Southampton to marry; that when the earl fell in love with