ld who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into
admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. 'Eloquence and
courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, 'are ever bountiful in the
amplifying vein;' and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually
blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends
achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All
the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification
with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of
Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary
critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collection of sonnets,
'Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with many odes and madrigals
interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of
Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which
included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French
poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and
at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. 'Ah, sweet content, where
is thy mild abode?') Thomas Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's
scholar;' the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him 'go forward in maturity as
he had begun in pregnancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, like Spenser;'
Campion judged his verse to be 'heady and strong.' In a sonnet that
Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' Earl of
Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were 'the heavenly lamps
that give the Muses light,' and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to
rise' to a height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare
sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord's eyes

that taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned's wing,
And given grace a double majesty;

while in the following sonnet he asserted that the 'worthier pen' of his
dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism,
for he 'stole that word' from his patron's 'behaviour.' The emphasis
laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's
'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his
patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets
directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested
race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet lxxxv. Shak