is
'character'd' in his brain. {112a} Sonnet xcix., which reproaches the
flowers with stealing their charms from the features of his love, is
adapted from Constable's sonnet to Diana (No. ix.), and may be matched in
other collections. Elsewhere Shakespeare meditates on the theory that
man is an amalgam of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire
(xl.-xlv.) {112b} In all these he reproduces, with such embellishments
as his genius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton,
Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy. In
two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged
in a mere literary exercise by offering him alternative renderings of the
same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases
twice over--appropriating many of Watson's words--the unexhilarating
notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has
the greater influence on lovers. {113a} In the concluding sonnets,
cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue
illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek
anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the
notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers. {113b}

Shakespeare's claims of immortality for his sonnets a borrowed conceit.

In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was
so certain of immortality that it was capable of immortalising the person
to whom it was addressed, he gave voice to no conviction that was
peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of
spirit, or spontaneous ebullition of feeling. He was merely proving that
he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a theme that Ronsard
and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets,
had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe. {114a} Sir Philip
Sidney, in his 'Apologie for Poetrie' (1595) wrote that it was the common
habit of poets to tell you that they will make you immortal by their
verses. {114b} 'Men of great calling,' Nash wrote in his 'Pierce
Pennilesse,' 1593, 'take it of merit to have their names eternised by
poets.' {114c} In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the 'eternising'
faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic.
Spenser wrote in his 'Amoretti' (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your