tors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

In Sonnets LXVI. and LXXIV. appear further similar meditations. Such
thoughts and meditations do not seem to be those of the successful and
prosperous man of thirty or thirty-five.

The persuasive force of the Sonnets which have been quoted or referred
to in this chapter is much increased by reading or considering them
together. To illustrate: four Sonnets have been quoted containing
direct statements by the poet that he was in the afternoon of life. It
needs no argument to establish that this concurrence of statements
made in different groups of Sonnets and doubtless at different times
has much more than four times the persuasive force of one such
statement. And in like ratio do the other Sonnets indicating the
reflections and conditions of age, increase the weight of the
statements in these four Sonnets. Taking them all together they seem
to present the statements, conditions, and reflections of a man
certainly past the noon of life,--past forty years of age, and so
older than was Shakespeare at the time of their composition.

If this conclusion is correct, it does not aid, but about equally
repels the claim that Bacon was the author of the Sonnets, or of the
plays or poems produced by the same poet. Bacon was born in 1561, and
was therefore but three years older than Shakespeare.

Footnotes:

[8] Lee's _Life of Shakespeare_, p. 87; Preface to Sonnets, Temple
Edition.

[9] In a note to page 30 is the poet's familiar expression or
statement of the Seven Ages of man. It clearly places the decade from
forty to fifty as past the middle arch of life, and next to the age of
the slippered pantaloon and shrunk shank; from thirty to forty he
describes as the age of the soldier, and from twenty to thirty that of
the lover.

[10] It is generally considered that the first of the Shakespearean
plays was produced in 1591. If they were written by an unknown poet
and brought out or published by Shakespeare, the time between their
first joint venture and the earlier date assumed for these Sonnets,
would be _three years_.

[11] The phrase "mine eye may be deceived," may al