duction to plays above named.

[2] Taine's _English Literature_, pp. 83, 84.

[3] Lee's _Life of Shakespeare_, p. 27. The Sonnet is printed in full
at p. 28.

[4] Dowden, _Shakespeare: His Mind and Art_, pp. 102, 103.

[5] Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Vol. II., Chap. V.

[6] Tyler, _Shakespeare's Sonnets_, p. 10.

[7] Lee's _Life of Shakespeare_, pp. 97, 125, 126.

CHAPTER II

OF THE AGE OF THE WRITER OF THE SONNETS

Adopting the views which fix the later period as the date of the
Sonnets, it seems practically certain that they were written as early
as 1598,--though some of them may have been written as late as
1601,--and that a great portion were probably written as early as
1594.[8] Shakespeare was born in 1564. Consequently they appear to
have been written when he was about thirty or thirty-four, certainly
not over thirty-seven years of age.

_It will be the main purpose of this chapter to call attention to
portions of the Sonnets which seem to indicate that they were written
by a man well past middle age,--perhaps fifty or sixty years old, and
certainly not under forty years of age._

But before proceeding to the inquiry as to the age of the writer, I
invite attention to what they indicate as to the age of the patron or
friend to whom the first one hundred and twenty-six seem to have been
written. In poetry as in perspective, there is much that is relative,
and in the Sonnets the age of the writer and that of his friend are so
often contrasted, that if with reasonable certainty, and within
reasonable limits, we are able to state the age of his friend, we
shall be well advanced toward fixing the age of the writer.

The first seventeen of these Sonnets are important in this connection.
They have a common theme: it is that his friend is so fair, so
incomparable, that he owes it to the world, to the poet, whose words
of praise otherwise will not be believed, that he shall marry and
beget a son. The whole argument clearly implies that the writer deems
such admonition necessary, because his friend has passed the age when
marriage is most frequent, and is verging toward the period of life
when marriage is less probable. His friend appears to the writer as
making a famine where abundance lies; he tells him that he beguiles
the world, unblesses some mother; that he is his mother's glass and
calls back the April of her prime; asks him why he abuses the
bounteous largess given him to give; calls him