, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
'Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage; {129}
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.'

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet
xxxviii.:

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?
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

The central conceit here so finely developed--that the patron may claim
as his own handiwork the _protege's_ verse because he inspires
it--belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation.
When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled 'Delia' to
the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same
note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as
Shakespeare. Daniel wrote:

Great patroness of these my humble rhymes,
Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .
O leave [_i.e._ cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . .
Whereof the travail I may challenge mine,
But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.

Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the 'Lucrece' epistle.
Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his
patron is 'part of all' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the
Sonnets with such expressions as these:--

[I] by a _part of all_ your glory live (xxxvii. 12);
Thou art _all the better part of me_ (xxxix. 2);
My spirit is thine, _the better part of me_ (lxxiv. 8);

while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton
in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as
'eternal love' (cviii. 9), and a devotion 'what shall have no end' (cx.
9).

Rivals in Southampton's favo