kely that so noble a man as Charles Mountjoy would have died of grief
for the disgrace he had brought upon a notoriously bad woman? As to Lord
Southampton's alleged flirtation with Lady Rich, which so excited
Elizabeth Vernon's jealousy, Mr. Massey has not one circumstance in
proof of it but the forced interpretation he chooses to put upon certain
lines of certain sonnets which he has wrested from their proper places,
as well as their proper meaning. After using such sonnets as the 144th
to express this jealousy, he quietly confesses at the end of the chapter
that it could not have gone very deep, as the intimacy of the two fair
cousins (for such was their relationship) continued to be of the
closest--that it was to Lady Rich's house that Elizabeth Vernon retired
after her secret marriage to the earl in 1598, and there her baby was
born, named Penelope after her cousin and friend! There was only matter
enough in it for poetry, Mr. Massey concludes after having upset the
whole order of the Sonnets to prove its reality.

Now, as to the story of Lady Rich's having been the mistress of Herbert,
for whom Mr. Massey says that twenty-four of the Sonnets were written.
William Herbert, afterward earl of Pembroke, was born in 1580. He came
up to London in 1598, being then eighteen years of age, and made the
acquaintance of Shakespeare, who was then thirty-four years old. Lady
Rich, at that time, according to Mr. Massey's own statement, was
"getting on for forty." The fact is that she was just thirty-five,
having been born, as he tells us, in 1563. According to the obvious
meaning of the Sonnets, the lady spoken of is much younger than
Shakespeare, instead of a year older, and, according to Mr. Massey, Lady
Rich was at that time (1597) in the midst of her love-affair with
Mountjoy. The lady of the Sonnets, if we take them literally, could have
borne no such high position as Lady Rich: she seems to have been neither
remarkably beautiful and high-bred, nor virtuous, and was evidently a
married woman of no reputation. (_Sonnets_ 150, 152.)

It is impossible to bring up separately, in a single article, the items
contained in a volume of 603 pages, so we must be content to leave Mr.
Massey's theory with these meagre allusions to its principal statements,
and pass on to that of Mr. Charles Armitage Brown. Upholding the opinion
that the Sonnets are autobiographical, he maintains that they are in
reality not sonnets, but poems in the sonn